Demise of C++?

fashla writes "Several somber and soul searching threads have been recently posted to the USENET newsgroup comp.lang.c++ such as "C++ is Dead" and "A Dying Era". The reason for this reflective mood is the sudden demise of the magazine C/C++ Users Journal (CUJ) http://www.cuj.com/ that had been published by CMP Media. Participating in the posts have been such C++ luminaries such as Bjarne Stroustrup and P.J. Plauger. While some contributers think that CUJ's demise is due to the general trend away from print, others think something else is afoot..."

Comments

Nah

[codeboost]

If you put it that way, everything is dying. I bet a buck that C# or Java will be dead as a rock in 20 years, just like C++ and most of the other programming languages we know today.
What we are noticing today is that programming languages alone just don't cut it anymore. The software is so advanced, that standard language constructs and libraries are way too raw to be applied to something useful for the average application programmer. Knowing frameworks, APIs and libraries is becoming a lot more important than using all the language paradigms and hidden tricks.

I think C++'s user base is splitting: On one hand there are the library and API developers, for whom the standard and the language are wholy. On the other hand, there are the application programmers, who care about the practical side of the language; they use it because it has advantages over other languages and has lots of libraries written for it.

My belief is that C++ is more alive today than ever. It is more powerful than ever. And it will be for a long time (in technology terms, indeed). Of course, in 10 years time it won't be recognizable. But it's wrong to say that C++ is dying.

We just got tired of being insulted

[Chemisor]

We, C++ programmers, just got tired of being insulted all the time, so we don't talk much any more. After all, every time we mention C++ we are told how bad it is and how stupid we all are for using it. Sure, we can rebut all those arguments, but there are so many loud people declaiming them that nobody ever hears us. So, we just shrug, shut up, and go back to writing code. If you don't want to listen, you are only hurting yourselves and your employers.

Re:We just got tired of being insulted

[pslam]

What Mr. Chemisor is saying is very familiar to me. Whenever the subject of C++ comes up on Slashdot, a big bunch of drones regurgitate some absurdities they heard somewhere about how it's slow, hard to use, and bogged down in legacy support. Some morons even go so far as to suggest plain C is superior. Some morons go so far as to make enormous projects using plain C and a bunch of type information hacks using macros that only serve to move type checking from compile-time to a run-time performance hit (cough GTK cough).

We're just plain tired of giving the same answers to the same people who never listen and carry on regurgitating the same crap they heard from some uninformed idiot. There's one thing that's very obvious from the numerous appearances of C++ on Slashdot recently: very few of the readers here have actually used C++ in any serious way.

You're only hurting yourselves when you dismiss C++ out-of-hand for uninformed reasons.

Re:From my point of view

[macshit]

The problem with C++ is that it is neither as simple as C nor has it the benefits of Java and C# as they allow for code that is easier to read and understand. The available tools are also better for the competing environments on the upper side.

My experience with C++ and Java is that Java is simpler to get your head around, but can really get annoying once you get going, because of the number of gross hacks and workarounds required to avoid excessive heap allocation. Compared to C, C++ often results in dramatically clearer code, simply because it offers the ability to wrap things with enough syntactic sugar that it makes source code much more concise.

However, taking advantages of C++'s strengths requires some discipline, and requires programmers to understand what's going on to some degree, and as we all know, the great majority of programmers are idiots.

I suppose in the end, the best progamming language for idiots will win...