Folks, It's quiet in here because I suppose you're all in lockdown guarding your mountains of bog-roll. I've got a TGIF contribution...
A colleague was discussing how to write the most transportable C++ code possible and sent links to C++ 17 features <https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/5262072/Cplusplus-17-New-Features-and-Trick> and C++ 20 upcoming. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B20> These articles quite shocked and angered me. I wrote C++ for 10 years until about 2003 (when .NET mercifully replaced it my LOB style work). I quite enjoyed C++ at the time, but after looking at those articles I'm quite angry that C++ has become one of the worst victims of feature-creep I have ever seen. It's like the C++ steering committee are suffering from an inferiority complex and have fought back by adding every feature of every other modern language into it. It's an insane jumble of the old low-level C-like language with bits of LINQ, C#, Rust and Haskell. The syntax of the std:: libraries is so cryptic it looks like a maths puzzle. Just what category of language has C++ become? What is it supposed to be best at? Why would I pick C++ to write a LOB app? What does Bjarne think about all this? There must be a huge number of developers globally using C++, but what are they doing with it that requires such a bloated and complex language? I haven't met a C++ developer in the last 15 years that can answer that question. *Greg K*
