C++ Is 45 Years Old. [Stroustrup] Says You Still Don’t Get It!

We were surprised when we read a post from C++ creator [Bjarne Stroustrup] that reminded us that C++ is 45 years old. His premise is that C++ is robust and flexible and by following some key precepts, you can avoid problems.

We don’t disagree, but C++ is much like its progenitor, C, in that it doesn’t really force you to color inside the lines. We like that, though. But it does mean that people will go off and do things the way they want to do it, for any of a number of good and bad reasons.

We will admit it. We are probably some of the worst offenders. It often seems like we use C++ the way we learned it several decades ago and don’t readily adopt new features like auto variables and overly fancy containers and templates.

He proposes guidelines, including the sensible “Don’t subscript pointers.” Yet, we are pretty sure we will, eventually. Even if you are going to, also, it is still worth a read to see what you ought to be doing. We were hoping for more predictions in the section entitled “The Future.” Unfortunately — unlike Hackaday authors — he is much too smart to fall for that trap, so that section is pretty short. He does talk about some of the directions for the ISO standards committee, though.

We should have known about the 45 years, as we covered the 30th birthday. We like safer code, but we disagree with the idea that C++ is unsafe at any speed.

Photograph by [Victor Azvyalov] CC-BY-SA-2.0.