// who here is a developer?

Roybrus said:

By far, I'd say my all around favorite development language has to be C++.

Features like operator overloading, in my opinion, give a fairly decent level of control. One particular area where it has been useful for me, was when I had to develop a portability library which reimplemented a few of the standard library functions and objects, including the string object, for this company I was working for last summer. The reason I had to develop the library was becase they were developing some code for these Arduino boards, but they wanted to test the code on a windows platform, and Arduino re-implemented many of the standard library functions and objects of the C/C++ language (and also removed many of them, such as exceptions). String operations in particular, were very different. They also needed a string object which could better handle storage of null characters within itself.I was able to write a rString class (replacement string), which could literally be dropped into the existing code with no problem, because I was able to use the function names they had been use to when developing on the Arduino platform, but I could also overload the operators they had been using. So without modifying the code (other than to basically find the word "String" and replace it with "rString"), we were able to convert all of our existing Arduino code to a more portable version of itself with minimal work required.

It goes without saying that having high level language features, like parametric polymorphism (templates), is a fantastic convenience, without sacrificing lower level features, like pointers, if you need them. It's the versatility of the language that really stands out to me as fantastic. Not to mention it's a write once, compile anywhere language, which means I can share my code with friends on different platforms with minimal hassle, usually.

I also have a lot of positive things to say about languages like C# and Java, scripting languages like Python (which I use literally all the time to automate parts of my physics homework), and of course I'm a fan of the web languages (Javascript for client-side programming, html5 for markup, CSS3 for styling, and PHP for server-side stuff). All things considered though, in the end, I think C++ will probably always be counted among my favorite languages, due to it's versatility as a language overall.

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twocows said:

I have a degree in computer science. I prefer to do C, but sometimes, for more complex tasks or if time is an issue, I use C# or Python, as development is usually faster in those languages.


C++ is awful. Rather than take several pages explaining why, I'll just link this, which does a better and more thorough job than I could do, anyway.

Generally speaking, there is always a better option than C++. If you are working at a low-level doing systems programming (e.g., embedded development, operating systems development), you should be using C. If you want higher-level constructs in C, use GLib and GObject. If future development isn't an issue, you can use D, which is basically C++ but not awful (and relatively obscure, so good luck finding other devs to maintain your D code). If you're doing pretty much anything else, you should be using a proper high-level language like C#, Python, Java, etc. "Being low-level" (or rather, low-level with a bunch of silly things that make bad assumptions to hide the fact that it is low level) is not an advantage unless you specifically require it, as is the case with the previous examples. Any other time and you're basically making your own life miserable with poor self-made implementations of what a lot of smart people already figured out how to automate much more efficiently. And as I said, C is my favorite language, so it's not as though I'm biased here, I love doing low-level, it's just not the right thing to do a lot of the time. Very rarely is performance going to be so much of a constraint that you have to be writing "low-level." A lot of people cite game development, which I'm not familiar with, but I believe even there, there are better tools for the job (XNA? using an already-existing engine/devkit? pretty much anything?).

There's basically one time you should ever be using C++, and that's when you're working on something that's already written in it. I can also kind of see the case for something like Qt, which hides a lot of the worse parts of C++. That said, even if you're maintaining C++ code, I would recommend at least considering something else (maybe C?) if you're going to do a separate addition (e.g., a new module or something).

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