On: Why would you learn C++ in 2016?

[akuma73]

When Moore's Law ends (imminently), performance and performance/watt will be harder and harder to come by.

In the long term, there may be a reversal in the trend towards "easy" languages.

[wcrichton → akuma73]

I doubt that easy languages will disappear. Instead, compilers will get smarter at compiling/synthesizing low-level/parallel/distributed code from high-level languages/specifications. See a lot of the recent work out of Stanford on domain specific languages with Terra [1] and its derivatives (e.g. Ebb [2]) as well as Delite [3].

[1] http://terralang.org/

[2] http://ebblang.org/

[3] http://stanford-ppl.github.io/Delite/

[zoeysaurusrex → akuma73]

This is a logical fallacy. More than likely, easy languages will become more performant.

[tachyonbeam → akuma73]

There already is a "reversal", to some extent, in that statically typed languages are making a comeback.

However, the performance of dynamically typed languages has also improved a ton. It's not unrealistic to think that you could write simple JS code and get about 50% of the performance of an equivalent C function, possibly more.

[Klathmon → tachyonbeam]

you are already there for some admittedly contrived situations.

Things like simple loops that work on typed arrays in javascript can really give C/C++ a run for their money right now.

[sbov → akuma73]

For the average programmer it ended a decade ago - most of us suck at concurrent programming.