It's a lot cheaper buying a macbook if you can get a 20% off credit, which you can get by buying a new porsche. Spend $100k, save several hundred dollars!
Saying that learning C++ helps with learning Rust is almost certainly true in a banal way. Learning any N languages will make the incremental cost of learning language N+1 a little lower, even if those languages are not closely related.
Are you actually claiming that, if you knew someone who knew, say, Python and JS, but no statically compiled unmanaged language, and that person needed to know Rust by 2017, that your advice would be to spend the first several months learning C++? I find this implausible.
C++ is a baroque language with way too many conflicting features, conflicting cultural standards, and general all-around cruft. Isn't it?
Disclaimer: I know so little C++ that we should assume that I don't know it, and I haven't written any Rust yet.
No, of course not. If your goal is to learn Rust by 2017, go learn Rust. I don't know how this became about Rust anyway, the article is about C++ in 2016.
I also won't disagree that C++ is a baroque language with too many conflicting features, conflicting cultural standards, and general all-around cruft. There's certainly plenty I hate about it, and it's rarely the first choice I'd reach for starting a new project these days.
I'm claiming that if you are a brand new programmer that's remotely interested in HPC, games, finance, search, compilers, databases, or system software and want to build solid fundamentals for a career, learn C++. Because:
1.) It will provide access to jobs in those areas, where you can be mentored by experience programmers.
2.) It will provide access to open-source codebases in those areas, where you can learn the structure and development processes of a large, existing body of software.
3.) It will teach you language concepts that transfer over to other languages.
4.) It will teach you why certain language features didn't make it into other languages, and the pitfalls of using a language that grew by accretion over 25 years, and the many ways that you can shoot your foot off with these language features, and how to debug it once you do.
A very small portion of programming is in the language. Over the course of your career, you'll use dozens of languages - hell, I've only been doing this professionally for 12 years and I've shipped software in a dozen languages. What matters a lot more are the patterns - being able to recognize why you might use a certain technique, and how the same technique manifests differently in different languages. In the fields that it's still widespread in, C++ will open a lot of doors to learn these.
> C++ is a baroque language with way too many conflicting features, conflicting cultural standards, and general all-around cruft. Isn't it?
This is a really common sentiment, but when pressed to name a specific thing that should be removed (ignoring backwards compatibility), people really struggle.
The standard library has a lot of cruft and poor legacy decisions, but it's several decades old. Any code that's been around for several decades is going to have cruft. Any language that is as successful as C++ will have the same problem when it reaches the age of C++. It's inevitable. Anything looks elegant and free of cruft when its only a few years old and has low enough usage that the maintainers can make breaking changes without breaking billions of lines of code.
Not sure what the op is saying, but I'll say that given programmer A who knows Python and JavaScript, and programmer B who knows c++, B will have an easier time learning Rust than A will.
Saying that learning C++ helps with learning Rust is almost certainly true in a banal way. Learning any N languages will make the incremental cost of learning language N+1 a little lower, even if those languages are not closely related.
Are you actually claiming that, if you knew someone who knew, say, Python and JS, but no statically compiled unmanaged language, and that person needed to know Rust by 2017, that your advice would be to spend the first several months learning C++? I find this implausible.
C++ is a baroque language with way too many conflicting features, conflicting cultural standards, and general all-around cruft. Isn't it?
Disclaimer: I know so little C++ that we should assume that I don't know it, and I haven't written any Rust yet.