Linked by Roberto J. Dohnert on Wed 28th Jul 2004 17:23 UTC
Most of us that work in the IT industry have been around for a long time. We started out in our parents basement writing code in some BASIC environment, ussually Commodore BASIC or QBASIC. Do you remember how thrilling it was? Your first program and it was something extremely basic but the point was it worked. Some of us got hooked right away and kept trying to solve problems and added more and more pushing the capabilities of whatever language we used. As we got older the environments progressed and the programming tools progressed and got more complicated.
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I think this (clearly) subjective comparaison is missing the point even though it's highlighting some pitfalls in C++.
He talks about garbage collection. In C++ you can also use GC, but you have the choice not to use it (which is very important). But it's often irrelevant, since you almost never need to allocate memory yourself in C++ (see my upper comment).
He's clearly ignoring references in C++, which accomplish most of what he says about '=' in Dylan.
He's always saying Dylan is better 'cause you can make a mistake such as with feature X in C++. Again, in C++ you have the choice to use that feature X when you actually need it. Again IMHO, most of the time, people are taking C++ from a pov that is too low level.
This kind of attitude doesn't to see the philosophy of C++ "what you don't use won't hurt you"; and the biggest pitfall in C++ is failing to comply with this philosophy.
The only good point he is making is about the obsolescence of the preprocessor. But seriously, on 8 hours of programming in C++ I probably spend 10 minutes writting preprocessor directives.