On Feb 21, 3:46 pm, "Ryan Ginstrom" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Behalf Of Nicola Musatti > > Newbies learn, and the fundamental C++ lessons are usually > > learnt quite easily. Unless we're talking about idiots, that > > is, but in this case at least C++ is likely to make their > > deficiencies evident sooner than most other programming > > languages. So, yes, your big company is likely to be safer > > with newbie C++ programmers than with Python newbie programmers. > > The danger of memory leaks alone makes C++ a decidedly newbie-unfriendly > language. Java I might go along with, but C++?
Memory *leaks* are just as common in garbage collected languages if not more, thanks to C++'s deterministic destruction and its standard library, especially if complemented with smart pointers such as Boost's shared_ptr. At least C++ programmers tend to know that memory must be managed, while newbies in other languages are often lead to believe - wrongly - that the garbage collector takes care of everything. Dereferencing invalid pointers however is indeed a more serious problem. This is the one lesson I had in mind when I wrote my previous message; newbies that are not hopeless tend to learn it rather quickly and the number of mistakes of this kind they make tends to fall in a rather short time. I do admit however that even experienced programmers make similar errors every now and again. While attempting to dereference a null reference is a rather common mistake in languages such as Java and C# - I'm not sure about Python - the one invaluable guarantee provided by the garbage collector is the absence of *invalid* references. This is one of the reasons why there's an ongoing effort to add garbage collection to the C++ standard, albeit in an optional form. Cheers, Nicola Musatti -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
