Hacker Poll: Is C++ the Language of the Future?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/07/hacker-poll-cpp.php

by dlebech • 15 years ago

44 66 15 years ago

Impossible2• 15 years ago

Even though there is a lot of hate for C++ as a language due to its complexity, it does fit in a niche (cross platform, object oriented native language) that no other language does, although D, Objective-C and Go come close.

I wonder if it'd make sense to develop a Coffee Script style language that compiles a "sane" subset of C++, gets rid of some of the nasty\annoying aspects of C++ (header files), and helps enforce good C++ coding practices (const correctness) but is close to C++.

aklein• 15 years ago

D feels to me the closest thing to a fixed C++. But without major additional momentum, I don't see how it can ever catch up to C++ in adoption.

Impossible2• 15 years ago

D is pretty nice. It has implemented almost everything people suggest when they mention how to fix C++, but it has some major problems as well. It'd have to be supported by a lot of different vendors on different platforms and architectures, and the standard library would has to be straightened out.

What I was proposing is a C++ compiler that could enforce a specific subset of standard C++, along with making things that are generally regarded as best practices default. Because of the complexity of C++ it might have to be a somewhat simplified version of it to work (something like http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/ModestProp...).

loup-vaillant6• 15 years ago

The key to enforce const correctness is to reverse the default behaviour. Make everything const by default, scrap "const", and introduce "mutable" (or "assignable", or something).

The result hopefully won't feel like a nano-management attempt, while people will think twice before they make anything "mutable".

babel17• 15 years ago

Oh Jesus. I did my 2 years of C++ development over 10 years ago, but I don't even mention it in my CV, because I am not going to use the mess that is C++ ever again. If I need something low-level, I will use Objective-C.

jamesu• 15 years ago

I find a lot of people complain "C++ is too complicated", but personally i don't think its that hard to get your head around... apart from the cryptic template handling.

Some of my more interesting projects are C++ based so i have a feeling it's going to stick around for quite a while yet.

slowpoke• 15 years ago

I think the problem is less that C++ is too complicated, but rather that it is more complicated than it needs to be at almost all tasks where the major pros of C++ don't matter (eg speed) - you're better of using whatever choice of high abstraction language (Python, Ruby, Haskell...) you prefer. And where those pros matter (to stay with the speed example, optimization), you're most likely better of using C or Assembly.

The only real use for C++ I still see is high performance gaming. And I hope that dies out in favor of real games.

maeon32• 15 years ago

I don't use C/C++ for the same reason I don't use assembly. There are superior languages out there that do a better job with everything important for building complicated software that is robust, easy to use, easy to maintain, fast and scalable. C++ is on its way out, it is still relevant and will be relevant for decades though. As is Cobol.

Strom2• 15 years ago

There are superior languages out there that do a better job

Your statement is false, because the choice of language depends on the job. For example, when I need to make something simple quickly I will do it in C#. However when I need to write an add-on to an existing application that doesn't have an official plugin system, then C++ and Assembly are really awesome.

loup-vaillant6• 15 years ago

It seems you missed his qualifier: "for building complicated software that is robust, easy to use, easy to maintain, fast and scalable"

Complicated + robust + easy to maintain is plain impossible in C++. Also, add-ons fit "enhance software" better than "building software".

pavpanchekha• 15 years ago

And yet fascinatingly enough, people still write Assembler code. (Especially with the popularity of JITs these days, a decent number of programmers know Assembler). And if perhaps you do not solve problems that C++ is designed to solve. That's find. Don't say that C++ is useless for that reason.

stonemetal• 15 years ago

What do you consider those languages to be?

loup-vaillant6• 15 years ago

My personal guess would be "anything higher-level than Java, plus C". From there, fights over Haskell vs Lisp vs Python vs Lua probably hit a point of diminishing returns (but it's still worth it to talk about it).

macavity23• 15 years ago

I don't like C++ as a language AT ALL, but the fact is, for cross-platform native app development, it's the only game in town unless you want to write C. Do you want your app (or some part of your app) to run on Windows/OSX/iOS/Android/Linux? Then you're writing it in C++.

It sucks, in many ways, but it's what we have.

tomjen3• 15 years ago

Actually there is no reason not to use Objective C, since gcc can compile that too.

microtonal• 15 years ago

Because there is no class library that is multi-platform and integrates somewhat nicely into the platform. Yes, I know GNUStep, but it doesn't come close to e.g. Qt in terms of integration.

pux0r3• 15 years ago

Sure there is. Primarily the requirement to have a runtime installed followed secondarily by the fact that many of the useful features are encapsulated in Apple specific libraries (or NeXT Step, although GNUStep takes care of that on many platforms).

Every other complaint I have against the language just stems from my familiarity with C++ and love of static typing (or compiler hints and syntactic niceties useful for writing high performance code - namely games).

profquail• 15 years ago

Or C#, which runs on all of the platforms you named and a few others as well.

timtadh• 15 years ago

Actually, using Python or similar is pretty attractive option for Gui development. I know it isn't hip to use WxWindows or Qt4, but if you want a gui that works on all three major platforms Python + Qt4/Wx is a pretty good way to go. Salt this opinion with all the usual trade offs of using Python and the trade offs of not using a "native" toolkit.

MrKurtHaeusler2• 15 years ago

I have spent around half my career focussing on C++, my current job is half C++ (generally just maintaining old programs, or writing new ones that use old libraries) and half higher level languages (generally preferred over C++).

I think the number of applications where C++ is an appropriate choice for a new project is a lot less now than it was 10 years ago.

Generally a higher level language (Java, C#, Python etc) should be looked at first in most cases, but I am sure C++ will have its niche for a while yet. Like games for example.

Cross platform could indeed be one of those niches, but just being native isn't that big a deal. Python and Java to give a couple of examples are just as compelling options in most cases.

mattgreenrocks• 15 years ago

I don't think C++ is the language of the future.

I do think we'll see languages that espouse some of the same guiding principles of C++, namely: multiple paradigms, only paying for what you use, native compilation options, and compile-time metaprogramming.

As it stands now, it has a huge marketing problem that's been perpetuated by a meme of "omg complexity!!!!!111," (aside: it's goofy how fashion-oriented developers are) so C++ in its current form could never rise up.

greyman• 15 years ago

I think Yes, C++ is the language of the future. It has several strong points, which are still relevant. Namely:

1. cross platform

2. the programmer can choose from several levels of abstractions, as appropriate for a particular project: low-level c-style coding, OOP, templates, meta-programming.

3. even the very high level abstraction usually doesn't induce performance penalty.

4. not using some property of the language doesn't induce performance penalty ("you pay only for what you use" principle).

5. New ISO C++11 standard makes the language even stronger

6. Many design decisions can be expressed by using templates or multiple inheritance, and enforced during compilation.

From internet discussions, I noticed that quite a few people under-appreciate the points 2) and 3), or don't have good understanding about why abstractions are an important part of software design (especially in larger projects).

Also, even in 2011, in a lot of projects the performance achievable only by native code is still very desirable or even required.

loup-vaillant6• 15 years ago

I have to challenge some of your points:

2. Just use 2 languages, like C + Lua. or C + anything-higher-level-than-Java. As a "language", such a combination is easily simpler than C++, and the high level part is way cleaner. My point is, don't use one complex tool when 2 simpler one can do.

On a side note, you should think about what OOP, templates, and "meta-programming" are good for. Most of the time, naked lambdas and closures solves OOP's problems in simpler ways. Templates solve parametric polymorphism (or "genericity"), and meta-programming is just a buzzword, as far as C++ is concerned. (When it is not a buzzword, the systems behind are so huge than I wonder if it's worth the effort, see the Boost library.)

3. That one sounds like a lot of work. A high-level and efficient abstraction has to be build from a fairly low level. Efficient memory management for instance, will probably be more complicated than the straightforward (but copy-ridden) RAII scheme.

6. Properly thought out type systems enforce better, and in a simpler way. See Haskell for instance. And even if your high level language is very permissive (Lua, Lisp…), you could still write a custom preprocessor. Not too daunting, as long as the syntax you pre-process isn't C++'s.

mfichman• 15 years ago

What do you mean when you say RAII is copy-ridden?

espeed• 15 years ago

The concurrency model will be a key ingredient in "the language of the future" -- right now I would put my money on Google's Go in part because of its concurrency model.

gte910h5• 15 years ago

Have you tried to staff a C++ project? If you don't have the ability to easily fire people, it's a horrible pain.

There are tons of people who think they know C++. There are a smaller subset that do.

If you get people who A> Refuse to follow the subset of the language your group is using on the project or B> deeply misunderstand one or two features, you're in total utter hell if you can't fire the person.

Most places don't have an easy enough ability to fire people to do C++ in my opinion, therefore C++ is not suitable for them.

yesimahuman2• 15 years ago

I think that indicates poor interviewing more than anything.

gte910h5• 15 years ago

People coding in a different subset of C++ is predictable from an interview? Howso? Not that they know it, but that they prefer it and do it to the contrary of people asking them not to.

Most other languages it doesn't matter anywhere near as much, as idiosyncrasies can be cordoned off well, but with C++, anyone doing anything strange or incompatible anywhere is a problem for most everyone. That same power and control is a curse when people are controlling things two different ways.

In a bigco which takes 6 months to fire someone, this is killer to a project. One guy can destroy a project in that timespan.

C++ has it's place, and that place is "where we can afford pretty high salaries and fire those people who don't work out quickly".

jpr4• 15 years ago

The "C++ is only usable in a subset" meme must die.

gte910h5• 15 years ago

If you have to keep engineers around who can handle it, it is.

Writing boost heavy code vs STL code vs object oriented code vs prototype based code vs highly functionally styled code vs custom allocated code vs reference passed code vs smart pointer code, interface based code vs heavily multiple inheritance based code vs flat hierarchy mixin template based polymorphism etc.

It gets expensive to keep people who do all of that around with the level of correctness you need to not have weird bugs that take forever to find. It usually means "You have few domain experts" on the team as well (for if the project is say, for financial software, or RF controllers, or modems, etc).

huhtenberg• 15 years ago

That's not a meme, that's life.

gaius3• 15 years ago

Well, that's true of many languages, Perl for example has gotten a bad rep because everyone on the project asserts their right to "there's more than one way to do it". S'what code reviews are for.

rohit_kanwar• 15 years ago

As macavity23 said (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2766974), C++ has certain strengths, and because of that, I think it will be around for a long, long time.

But at the same time, developers will prefer working in higher-level (more productive) languages whenever possible.

So, IMHO, C++ is a language of the future, not the language of the future.

fedorabbit• 15 years ago

As the closest relative to C, and the cross-platform language, tech world can't really live without it. But you can, of course... is it the programming language of the future? I think the programming language of the future hasn't been created yet.

16s• 15 years ago

Big C++ fan here. I came to C++ after learning Python. I simply love it and the Boost libraries only make it better.

If I could only have one programming language, it would definitely be C++. I can do anything with it on any operating system. No vendor or IDE or build environment lock in. It's a solid ISO standard with multiple compiler support.

I still use bash, Python and Ruby for quick test scripts and prototyping and I like them as well.

phamilton• 15 years ago

It's not a solid ISO standard. One of my coworkers recently gave me a c++ library to use. I linked to it and started making calls and found out that the STL from his compiler ( VS 2003) was incompatible with the STL from my compiler (VS 2010). They were simple things, like function calls that had their types changed, but nonetheless it rendered his library useless to me.

Compare to C, where everything is heavily standardized and you can use libraries from different compilers without much difficulty.

forgotAgain• 15 years ago

C++ is as complicated as you make it. Start with the basics and add on whatever works for you.

I think most people complain that C++ is overly complex because they try to learn it at the same time they try to learn a complex (typically GUI ex. MFC) framework. If you're learning C++ start with backends. Strip it down so that there aren't so many things to learn initially.

The same thing could be said for any language worth a darn. It stands out more for C++ because it's typically only used in heavy lifting situations. It's almost impossible to learn and produce something coherent in this case. Again though that would be true for any language suitable for such situations.

meow• 15 years ago

I hope some kind of Open VM comes in future so that languages can evolve independent of libraries. It will be awesome to run C# and Java on the same VM.

jpr4• 15 years ago

Why on earth would anyone want to use Java the language on anything else than JVM and get rid of the one and only alleged advantage that Java has?

turbojerry• 15 years ago

Take a look at Parrot

http://www.parrot.org/

Nelson69• 15 years ago

Have you ever debugged a class that used free instead of delete?

I can't help but think that people that suggest this stuff simply look at lists of features and see "lambda" and think C++ has somehow been modernized. Still fundamentally, it's producing machine code and fundamentally it has a fairly limited runtime and compared to what a LISP coder thinks of when he thinks of closures you might not want to call what C++ has 'closures.' Maybe the fact that the article referenced "lambdas and closures" is what throws me off... that's two features, right? haha The posts that mention C++'s cross platform nature also kind of make me laugh, it's sort of true, it's also remarkably easy to make it not true, just using "int" somewhere will break it some cases and if one of your platforms in Visual C++, then you'll probably have 2 code bases #ifdefed in to one, you can make it work but you have to do some work.

C++ probably won't die, not exactly that languages just die. Microsoft is all in with it, and many other organizations use it. It seems like we are in an era where there is more freedom to match the tool to the job than ever before and I can't imagine starting a medium or large scale project in C++ when Java and .NET are both still very viable. I can't imagine any serious C++ web app development, I can easily see some Ruby, Python or something other calling a chunk of C++ code, but I just can't see it rendering javascript and html in any serious way, it makes very little sense. Now VMs, runtimes, browsers, they'll likely continue to have some C++ in them for some time. It's a fine tool for some jobs. I also find is puzzling, the OpenJDK is GPL, simply Oracle's ownership somehow suggests Java is ending? If that's really what matters, then pretty clearly Go and Objective-C are what the future is, just looking at corporate ownership and momentum.

From a feature matrix? Sure C++ is the next big thing. From reality? I think and hope that it's future use shrinks and becomes more specialized.

blub• 15 years ago

I don't think there are many people that have debugged a class that used free instead of delete as there is simply no reason to write the word "free" in a C++ code base.

Even if this somehow happened, allocators include protection at least in debug mode that will let you know when you're doing something obviously wrong.

Writing int won't break your program, I don't see why it would, unless you're making assumptions about range - which you shouldn't. If you need an integer of a certain length there is stdint.h

mickeyben• 15 years ago

What we need is not a language of the future but a platform.

Look at Java today with it's language ecosystem; scala, clojure, jruby, ...

jpr4• 15 years ago

I'm looking at it right now, and I'm on the verge of projectile vomiting.

Kilimanjaro• 15 years ago

My bet is on Go. Once the gates are open, the flood will bring em to the top. Go on the browser, server, mobile, desktop, os, everywhere. By Google.

naner• 15 years ago

James notes the uncertainty surrounding Java following Oracle's acquisition of Sun, and the uncertainty around .NET as Microsoft seems to be de-prioritizing it in Windows 8.

I can't imagine Java and .NET developers moving to C++ much less enterprises changing course.

gaius3• 15 years ago

Yes the assertion in the linked article that MS is replacing C# with something called "WinC++" is frankly, bizarre, and calls the author's credibility starkly into question.

zwieback• 15 years ago

The comments on this page are just like C++ itself - all over the place, some of everything. I heard the same comments in the early 90's, when I was doing exclusively C++.

That's why it will still be around 5, 10 and 20 years from now - as long as there's something for everyone to dislike it will also make enough people happy enough to continue using it.

gaius3• 15 years ago

There are two kinds of languages. Those people hate, and those no-one uses.

petpixie• 15 years ago

I think c++ is great to learn on, but I hate working with it day in and day out. It's also close enough to objective-C and also to C# that it's going to remain valuable to learn.

kennystone• 15 years ago

It is a language that will be used well into the future. There will be no 'the' language. These things are silly.

btcoal• 15 years ago

I am limiting this prediction to mass-consumed applications of technology.

If we extrapolate (obligatory: http://xkcd.com/605/) present trends it seems that the platform of the future will be the web.

This will require fast internet connections on computing devices (whatever those will look like in 10 years) as pervasive as water and electricity in the rich world. And we are getting there.

So the language of the future will be based on this platform. The obvious choice then would be javascript. But javascript has a lot of problems so most likely someone will invent a language of the form javascript++ within a few years.

georgieporgie• 15 years ago

I've been using C++ almost exclusively for over a decade. C++ is wonderful, powerful, ugly, and dangerous. It's entirely dependent upon the developer, and it varies with popular trends. Just when you master something like Boost, you move to a new company where you aren't allowed to use it. Everyone preaches his own religion of whitespace, best practices, and patterns.

Lately, I've found the ugliness inescapable and deeply irritating:

    for (std::vector<mytype>::const_iterator i = myinst.begin() ...

The repurposing of the 'auto' keyword in C++0x can greatly reduce this ugliness:

    for (auto i = myinst.begin() ...

But, of course, people will abuse auto and have "auto n = 5;" (a 'foreach' makes this even cleaner, but the above syntax exemplifies other situations as well)

I've recently been doing a bit of C# coding again. I'm stunned at how quickly I get get stuff working, mostly because .Net contains all the boilerplate I would either write myself, or have to track down in 3rd party libraries. I wrote a page scraping tool the other day in C#, on my Mac, in vim, with the Mono C# compiler. I had it done in under an hour, and it runs on both platforms I use. My productivity increased by about 8x (clearly not universally applicable), and my enjoyment increased even more.

So, no, C++ probably isn't the future. The future probably looks like Python and Javascript on the web, C# in business applications, and plain C at the bottom.

lucian1900• 15 years ago

I think C++ is possibly the worst language still mainstream. It's just horrible, in so many ways.

I really hope people will stop doing such silly things, but realistically, it's unlikely to change too soon.

daemin• 15 years ago

How about we just end this speculation over what is the next big language, and just check back in 5 or 10 years and see what is actually popular and useful.

There's so much that can change in one year let alone five or ten, therefore it isn't easy to make predictions that far out.

For the record I use C++ in a day job, and there's an awful lot of code written in it, so it will exist in some form or other for a very long time to come. Need I mention COBOL? There's also enough stuff written in Java, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, Ruby, and Python for them to easily last into the next decade.

Hacker Poll: Is C++ the Language of the Future?

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