My dad pointed me to an excellent article entitled The Perils of JavaSchools. Although it's a little lengthy, the article is an incredibly worthwhile read on why schools that teach Java as the primary programming language are, to some degree, dumbing down the future generation of computer programmers. My alma mater took this route, but I was fortunate enough to be in the class before this change was made. I picked up C++ first: both on my own (by learning Visual C++ and MFC) and in school (my first programming courses were all taught using C++). After learning the intracacies of C++, learning Java was incredibly simple (almost too simple, in fact). I believe I passed my "Java for C Programmers" course with an A+; a feat that required very little effort on my part.

Once one knows about pointers, objects in Java become rediculously easy to discuss. As does the entire programming language itself. Java is a fine programming language (it fixes a lot of the brokenness in C++), but to know C++ is to feel enabled. I can wield the mighty sword of pointers and memory management; something that many Java programmers do not, and quite possible can not, ever do. I'm not saying that Java programmers cannot become successful C++ programmers; I'm simply making the point that there are more Java programmers who cannot pick up C++ than there are C++ programmers who cannot pick up Java.

Again, I highly recommend the article. The author also has an incredibly enticing reading list, which he uses to train managers in his company. There are a number of books there that look really great. I hope to begin reading The Mythical Man Month, the masterpiece written by Fred Brooks. It's one that I've been meaning to read for a long, long time.

Before I ever began my programming career, I had a sneaking suspicion that an abundance of coding at work would lead to decreased programming activity at home. And I fear that this is indeed becoming the case with me. I write a mixture of C++ and Perl all day long, five days a week. This level of productivity really taxes my mind, and it has recently resulted in an increase of non-computing related activity each evening. I’m reading books more often (Prince Valiant has certainly helped in that arena), and I’m watching more TV than I used to. I even occasionally go outside! Things like Googlebar Lite and my toolbar tutorial are slipping as a result. I dislike it, but my motivation for programming after 5:00 PM has dropped greatly. Weekends provide some level of salvation, but is that enough?

I do a fair amount of C++ programming these days, thanks to my new career at IBM. C++ is my strongest language, and the first language I picked up when I began programming. As such, it's fairly special to me. However, the more I time I spend with C++, the more I come to see how broken it is.

For instance, why are strings not a base type? Character arrays simply do not suffice. I am aware of the STL string class (and I make use of it), but adding on this capability after the fact seems cheap. Strings should be a first-class object, and should have all the associated operators directly available (==, +=, etc.). And regular expressions should be directly available for strings, since they are so incredibly useful. There are tons of places in my code where access to regular expressions would make my life profoundly simple. For example, take Perl's match operator (m//). How many Perl programs out there do not make use of this operator? My guess is that the number is very low. It's no different in C++; reg-exes could be used all over the place.

Other glaring omissions also crop up. Where is the foreach loop construct? Why use #include instead of packages or modules? Where are the array operators (shift, unshift, pop, push)?

There's no question that C++ is a robust language. It's fast, gives the programmer complete control (both a blessing and a curse), and it has an incredible user base (which results in excellent support when you need it). But it's clearly dated. Will we still hold on to this language in 20 years? Or will something innovative finally come along to push it aside? Let's hope for the latter.