Wednesday 8 May 2019

How other languages can help

Wish I had tried other programming languages way before. I knew what Basic is, because it was my first language contact back in the 1980's. But then I moved to C and later C++. Recently I have tried out languages like D, C# and most recently Go. I think they can help by giving back more motivation to work with C++, because most other languages suck.

Yes, they suck. Even though C++ is far from being a perfect language it has the least amount of suckage.

So what is the problem with other languages? It's often not the theory behind the language, it's the implementation of it which should give the developer more or less painful access to things like graphical output. Yeah, about that... It's mindblowing to realize that the main output type of languages like Go is text output in the terminal or console window. There are external gui libraries, but in case of Go they are quite difficult to install/use and also they are bloated because some weird reason the language works. Maybe it's the garbage collection memory model or something like that.

I guess some of these languages were never designed for desktop use, but then why do people still ask why C++ is the most common language when the answer is obvious. It's because you can actually write desktop software in C++, even it's an ancient language and GUI support is quite bad with bloated antiquated gui libraries like wxWidgets. The point is it's still better than anything else.

Not only I'm sick and tired of all those things, but then there are people who religiously defend some sucky language like Go. Don't these people have anything else to do, like write actual working computer programs. They never do that, because they can't.

2 comments:

Erick Subero said...

Hi, Krice. I have time reading your posts and with this one I've been thinking about C++. I'm a programmer who uses C# but I want to try things in C++, what tips (or links) do you recommend me to do roguelikes/roguelites/things in C++?

Krice said...

C++ and C# are quite similar, well not exactly, but somewhat. In game development the language is not the main "problem", it's everything else. But if the language is not suited for games then it's harder. I think the big difference is that C++ doesn't have automatic memory management, you have to release memory and other resources. If you are good at C# then it's a viable option, because it's probably the only other language I would recommend. Game development itself is another thing, it's a large topic and can't be easily summarized in a comment. Read books and read source codes.