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Hey I'm curious on how your reminder app works and to what effects, if you're willing to share. I'm on iteration 3 already of my reminder app, also vibe coded, and it helps me a lot. My first one was inspired on Remind [0].

0: https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/

> if c++/cfront didn't ride on the tails of c, I'm skeptical it would've seen widespread use

What launched C++ into success was Zortech C++. At the time, 90% of programming was done on MS-DOS. Cfront was nearly unusable on DOS, because:

1. agonizingly slow to compile

2. no support for near/far pointers, which was essential for non-trivial apps

Zortech C++ fixed those problems, and sold like wildfire. This provided critical mass for C++ to succeed.

Something that not many people consider. It is almost certain that C++ "saved" C by existing. Without C++ there would be an enormous pressure to add more features to C itself. One reason why C committee could get away without adding much over the years was that they could nod towards C++ and say "that's their job, not ours". And if later didn't exist who knows what kind of language C would become. Classes? Templates? Lambdas? We can only speculate.

Hilarious coming from the guy whose shitty Multics ripoff directly inspired "Worse is Better"

From the essay:

"Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses.

A further benefit of the worse-is-better philosophy is that the programmer is conditioned to sacrifice some safety, convenience, and hassle to get good performance and modest resource use. Programs written using the New Jersey approach will work well both in small machines and large ones, and the code will be portable because it is written on top of a virus.

It is important to remember that the initial virus has to be basically good. If so, the viral spread is assured as long as it is portable. Once the virus has spread, there will be pressure to improve it, possibly by increasing its functionality closer to 90%, but users have already been conditioned to accept worse than the right thing. Therefore, the worse-is-better software first will gain acceptance, second will condition its users to expect less, and third will be improved to a point that is almost the right thing. In concrete terms, even though Lisp compilers in 1987 were about as good as C compilers, there are many more compiler experts who want to make C compilers better than want to make Lisp compilers better.

The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++."

https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

But C++98 is so different to even C++11. Bjarne's book covering C++11 read completely differently to the 98 version, I found.

> kiss goodbye to any notion of being able comprehend existing code that's not written by you (until llms arrived).

In my experience it takes a while (<=3 months) for folks to become proficient when they see an alien dialect of c++. That may sound totally unacceptable to you (fair). Cpp is also a “big tent” language in that it is genuinely multi-paradigm.

I think LLM’s might help, but sometime they hurt too (confidently/persuasively wrong analyses). The gain is large for small/trivial contributions. For changes that require genuine understanding, I’m not sure (large error bars personally as to whether the sign is even positive).

I highly respect the Ken Thompson and the rest of the old UNIX hands, but wouldn't they admit that the real world is messy and the best solutions in isolation don't always win?

Their creation C and UNIX won over the more advanced LISP and Smalltalk systems because they were simpler to implement. Even their own more advanced Plan 9 based OSs could not displace the more widespread unix-like systems.

It seems distribution and 'good enough' to rely on always wins. IMO, dynamic languages like Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP and the heavily marketed Java provided good enough high level facilities that have prevented people from reaching for Lisp and Smalltalk.

Looking at it through this lens, perhaps C++ was the vehicle for strapping some high level facilities on a widely adopted low level performant language that made it just good enough of a technology for wide adoption.

UNIX founders never liked C++ that much, note how Plan 9 and Inferno only have C as the systems language, with the Alef experiment, and later Limbo.

Followed a couple of years later contribution to Go's design, exactly to avoid C++ at Google.

And replace it with what?

I have read as much as I can on the history of C++ and I'm looking forward to watch this. I find the process of it's evolution deeply fascinating.

Wow is this just a shitpost (it was funny!) or do your builds actually take about an hour? That's nuts, if so.

His talks are some of my favorites; he's a great speaker. Very engaging and has a great sense of humor, which he uses to great effect.

Agreed, _Modern C++ Design_ is probably the programming book I've gotten the most out of in my career.

I read it recently. I liked a few of the chapters especially how policy classes fix some issues with OO design. I do recommend asking an AI chatbot to summarize each chapter and say what the modern equivalent is since some of the idioms have improved. I think one whole section was obsoleted through the use of std::variant and std::visit.

Yes, I feel the same way. I met Andrei once on a Meetup in Munich, basically telling him that he taught me how to think which led to a somewhat awkward conversion. Fun times nonetheless :-)

Of course, all his books are a must read.

> If you are the 'systemizer' type and like to have an extremely precise mental model of the thing you write down to the last bit, nothing beats C++.

I would say the same thing of Rust.

An elegant language is one that achieves a lot with very little. Forth and Scheme are elegant languages. You're free to like working in C++, and you can sure achieve a lot with it, but I don't think it's controversial to say that it does not do so with very little.

Personally I don't find programming with C++ that hard. The downside is it needs a brain warm-up, and this is per project, but once that flywheel is spinning, I find it almost effortless to write code.

I have to go through the same warm-up more or less for any language I work with, so it's not that different than writing Python, Go or Java for me.

For games, C++ becomes a much simpler language since game code bases usually ignore the C++ stdlib (at least mostly, and for good reasons, e.g. see [0]). And without the stdlib C++ is actually kinda-sorta okay-ish.

Related, the main problem with the C++ ecosystem is that everybody carves out their own language subset, so it's not one ecosystem but many ecosystems with contradicting styles and language/stdlib subsets. This makes code reuse via libraries much harder than it should be.

[0] https://hftuniversity.com/post/the-c-standard-library-has-be...

One of my hobbies is rummaging around thrift stores appreciating tacky things from bygone eras, sifting through ill-conceived modern junk, and delighting in simple, solid tools where I can find them.

That's what it's like to be a C++ programmer.

You're right that C++ has a lot of features. But like mentioned elsewhere most projects define their own conventions and the subset of features that they use.

Also the nice thing about having a large set of features is that C,++ allows you to write very nice abstractions (or not) at both very low or at very high level. In other words you can be very low level with online ASM and bit operations and bit and direct memory manipulation or very high level almost like a script language. Whatever the problem domain needs C++ has got you covered.

You can be pretty productive even with 70% of the language :) It is a common misconception that C++ is suitable only for game engines and similar domains. It is perfectly fine for applications domain as well.

As a side note, regarding your profile info, unless you are based in North Korea, please at least add one 0 to your rate. You'll get more long-term and high-quality clientele.

> But if someone told me to write C++ myself, I'd cry. There's too much to memorize, and the standards are too varied

If someone tells you to write a web app, do you also cry? Surely there's more JavaScript frameworks than subsets of C++ at this point, no? Do you also go memorize all of them? Or do you just quickly pick one, and then only learn that one, and forget the rest exist? Because that's kinda how you approach C++. You pick a subset (like, say, just modern C++, only caring about C++17 & later or whatever), and just use that. And move on with your life. There's absolutely no reason to learn how std::auto_ptr works because it's dead in the same way you aren't learning how PHP & CGI works if you're making a modern web app. They're dead relics of the past that you can just pretend don't exist.

Not really, despite all its warts, it is exactly because of them that many reach out to C++.

Many of us don't like C, it was already too little and too unsafe, when the first C++ compilers started to hit the market in early 1990's, hence why all desktop OSes moved into C++ for their frameworks.

The return to C has caused by the rise of FOSS, UNIX winning the server room, and early GNU coding standards to use only C as main compiled language.

Additionally as many other programming language ecosystems have discovered, it is easy to beat C++ in version 1.0, and eventually all of them grow to get the complexity of their own.

I reach for C++, because the language runtimes, compiler tooling, and GPGPU frameworks I care about are partially written in C++, and I am not in the place to be writing new ecosystems myself.

funny, I think the same about rust.

The language is fine, mostly, nowadays.

The ecosystem isn't fine - just to get a project going requires picking a non-trivial set of tools and approaches, none of which the C++ standard enforces or guides to.

For example, will you manage dependencies via packages? If so, with what? What will you use for building your project? The list goes on and on.

>There's too much to memorize, and the standards are too varied. When I go to a project site for maintenance and it's a C++ project, I instantly lose energy — because it's just too difficult.

If you'd already been using it for 10+ years you wouldn't feel that way, because you'd already have memorized a lot of it.

Continuing the analogy, browser devs are just users playing in C/OS/kernel program.

I tend to think of the web and the internet as distinct things.

For the language of the web I'd probably nominate HTML.

For the language of the internet it's a lot less clear to me.

Yes, these are the same people: https://www.cultrepo.com/

Apparently, they are making documentaries about open source software.

A documentary can't always get who they want to get.

They may be humble in their older age but the good majority of people on the list were known for anything but their humbleness back when C++ was a much more dominant language.

Using "humble" to describe a list of folks that include John Romero is certainly an interesting choice of adjective.

Interesting, I don't find modern C++ verbose at all. 'auto', range-based for-loops and structured bindings did a great job at reducing the verbosity of C++98.

On top of that, C++ allows to design very concise APIs. (One of my favorite examples is sol2: https://github.com/ThePhd/sol2).

Library code involving templates, on the other hand, can be pretty complex and hard to read. Concepts and other C++20 features (like [[no_unique_address]]) are certainly an improvement, but only new projects with no backwards compatibility requirements can actually use them (unconditionally).

The trouble with that is the more mental capacity you exert on the language the less you have available for the task at hand.

C++ is quite amenable to making things less verbose. For example: Instead of a standard library algorithm taking a pair of iterators, you could have a function taking a container and calling the other function with its start() and end(). And then, with newer versions of the language, you can use a ranges-based function. There are lots of such syntactic hacks, from `using` through typed literals all the way to preprocessor macros (which we want to avoid, but are still there).

That's how you emulate language features that aren't there originally. I've "impelemented" a static code block, like in Java:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/34321324/1593077

and that's all in C++98. The implementation is a bit ugly but the use is terse and self-expalantory.

Try Java

C++ is one of the languages less suited to the strengths of coding agents.

The language which still supports C-style pointers, arbitrary datatype conversions, and inherits architecture-specific undefined behavior gives you too many ways to fail at solving a problem.

As a programmer, I love coding in C++ because I know what I'm doing. I'd hate reviewing C++ code though.

If this is a rhetorical question I genuinely don't know what's the implied answer. Why would AI specifically make C++ grow?

Let's assume that it's because of AI for this case.

Is this good or bad?

but do vibe coders even use c++? won't they use js or python?

Herb's blog post links to the SlashData Developer Nation Survey, so presumably that's what the claim is based on. The company has a methodology page here [1], and it looks like the Developer Nation panel [2] is one of the sources used by that company.

[0]: https://www.slashdata.co/research/developer-population

[1]: https://www.slashdata.co/company/methodology

[2]: https://developernation.net/

You can hear the engineer in that second question. They hear a wild statistic pulled out of someone's ass and ask what is that sticking to the side?

Hello Mike.

(if you mean that film, most likely no.)