Do you play games? Do you play console games, or desktop games? Do these games support 3D rendering? Soft shadows? Physically based lights? Pathfinding of crowds of people or units? Literally hundreds of thousands of projectiles? Networked replication? Leverage all the cores of your desktop/device/console while doing the above? Support unique or specialized data structures? Execute a runtime that CAN'T tolerate non-deterministic GC pauses?

I make games. What am I supposed to code that in? Fucking javascript? Ruby? C#? Go stfu and die yourself. If you want to come up with a language that can get the job fucking done than by all means, go for it and fail miserably. Otherwise, stop using any of the products that leverage C++. We don't want you.

Hopefully Rust will take a chunk out of this market, but I agree that folks don't seem to realize how important systems programming is in supporting their higher level languages.

:(

Good compile-time dispatch is a relatively easy in C++, but damn-near impossible in C. There are actual legitimate reasons to use C++.

I hear that not all development is web development. In fact, those in the know know that even very popular well-known companies that make their profits from web applications heavily leverage C, C++, and tools (and languages) that are themselves built with C and/or C++ or run in embedded or VM processes that are themselves built with C and/or C++.

I find it amusing that the new languages being heavily touted in the non-functional space (that would be Go, D and Rust) are all using C and C++ as their targets for replacement. Everybody loves to hate C and C++, yet the tech world literally runs on them, and will for the foreseeable future.

This isn't to say there isn't anything better, or that they'll never be replaced.

You also misspelled "affront."

What would you suggest instead? Until there is something that is as general purpose as C++ and has the same level of performance it will continue to survive.

Rust?

Maybe in 4 or 5 years, if things go well. There hasn't even been a 1.0 release yet. That's the bare minimum necessary for a lot of existing C++ users to even consider Rust as a potentially viable option.

Assuming Rust 1.0 is released sometime this year, it'll still take a number of years before Rust even begins to offer the very wide range of libraries/frameworks that are available to C++ developers.

Interfacing with these existing C++ libraries/frameworks may speed things up, but at that point its disputable whether it's really Rust being used.

Rust may be among the most promising alternatives, but it's just not there yet, and won't be for some time.

Not everyone works in webdev. Some people do embedded development, and use a reasonable subset of C++.

Get out of your bubble.

Care to justify your bile?

Wow that fucking sucks. Installing rails to run a shell script, no thanks I think I would rather blow my brains out.

Quite a load of shit. Those innovations are now taken for granted and the "this was then", "this is now" comments it where you see the leakage in the arguments.

Im not going to quote anything from this to dismiss it. Its simply wrong, a bit extreme, and out of context. You would have to be an idiot to buy the entire premise.

This comment is a load of shit, and so since you're happy to dismiss an entire essay without any back up, evidence or argument, I can just as easily dismiss your comment. Hitchen's razor.

Another "functional languages make everything better", load of crap.

Maybe we should just ask God to make our servers work. Since we are on the topic of religion anyway.

In in my mid 40s, went through some life burnout due to trying to start my own business, and had to come back to just being the most solid engineer I can be.

I do contracts almost exclusively because I have no faith in the employment market as an employee given the current trends in hiring.

Also I dont feel that being an employee makes me more of a team player, In most places contractors are doing the real work and employees are sitting around chatting over the water cooler. Id rather get work done.

Im a generalist and in spite of the rather idiotic statements about that in the first comment, its really the only way to go, if you are not a generalist you are likely not employable regardless of your age. Any shop that has hordes of 20 year olds spitting out HTML/CSS is wasting their time.

The beauty of being a generalist is that once you have enough experience and a core set of tools, you can add new ones or not at your leisure. The pace of things is really not that fast, about 80% of all tools that get released are just junk that noone will remember in a couple years.

One benefit of being an older developer, is that in a decent shop people tend to notch down the bullshit factor, because they know you have heard it before.

Conning people into doing things that are stupid is reserved for the 20 somethings.

I found your post highly insightful, as a 20-something generalist. Thanks for sharing.

"The problem for some people is that these kinds of more generalized roles put you in charge of systems that do not have the sort of clear-cut deterministic behavior you remember from your programming days", what could you be possibly talking about? So generalists work on non-deterministic systems? Clear-cut? Gimme a break man that statement and perhaps your whole remark is a load of bull. You are making a statement that generalists arent programmers. Generalists make more money than anyone else except for security specialists.

I remember having one of these. But I had completely forgotten about it until I read the article. Logo, wow.