Cum Mortuis in Lingua Mortua

Please forgive me for a small IT related rant here as, thanks to some wanker at The Times, I no longer have a work blog.

For byzantine political reasons this week has seen your little green scaly friend enrolled on a course in the C++ computer programming language. Now I last used said language, briefly, back in the mid-90's and things have apparently moved on a bit since then so off I toddle into the world of void pointers and memory leaks.

Well yes things have moved on a bit. There was a time when C++ was the language of the elite coder, when to get anything to run at speed this was the language you used and only manly men with square jaws and six-pack chests were brave enough to code in it. Not any more, now we have Java and C# (the latter being my weapon of choice) and, quite frankly, they just piss all over C++ these days. Speed and being "close to the hardware" was always C++'s strength, the price you paid was a labyrinthine syntax of addresses and pointers and having to be the top of your game to avoid writing a bunch of code that leaked memory like a leaky thing. Well I ran a couple of tests on the lappy on the train home last night doing some pretty close to the metal stuff (read in file, arse around with the byte stream, write it out again) and C# was just as fast, if not faster and an order of magnitude easier to code. as I didn't need to arse about with headers, allocating and deallocating memory and all that rubbish.

I am probably going to get a bunch of flak for this but I really can't see the point of C++ any more, it's become as legacy as VB and COBOL, the only person I know who writes in C / C++ and has justification as to why he has to writes controller chips for computer controlled milling machines. There really is no reason to write general purpose application code in C++ any more.

With any luck come 5pm on Friday I can shove the course notes in a drawer for some Tony Robinsonoid to dig up in 3427 and intone "Ah yes this clearly has a ritual meaning" over.

With my luck I'll probably get assigned to maintain some legacy C++ app. Jesus some random motherfuckers are going to get torched it that happens I can tell you.