>>72
Indeed. But think again: what is an
expert programmer for you? I won't
completely discredit the authors you've mentioned, but I wouldn't really call them "expert" either -- specially because, seeing some code they augment, I wouldn't use nor recommend some of the practices; I wouldn't hire them for my team. These authors respond more to the financial interests of the companies which support them than to the community of which they claim to make part. They drive the development of things like Boost, turning them into models to follow, naming them "expert" code -- and in the same time offering advice and consulting at expensive fees; a very interesting market strategy indeed. It seems even
natural for me that these people will separate themselves from the crowd, and protect their reputation as "experts".
Besides, while Java, C# and others are leading technologies owned by the same companies which pay the "experts", C++ is rather owned by no one -- why would a company invest on something it doesn't own if it can invest on it's own technology, which is already deployed and already popular in the language battlefield? It could be argued that the "experts" have even
intentionally worsened a number of things out in C++11, but I won't go too far as to sustain this idea. The fact is that C++ is of few commercial interest compared to technologies which are so aggressively pushed by companies nowadays.
Expert programmers are programmers with good experience, which have good knowledge of the technology they use, and which have passed through some tough situations during their careers. They have sensible notions regarding many aspects in a project, even if they wouldn't agree on every such aspect. And there are a
lot of experienced programmers out there: not only those inside the C or C++ fandom, but in particular there are a good number of them in these groups. There are a lot of people which could have done much better if they just expressed their points objectively and neutrally, instead of bashing themselves senseless with petty discussions regarding specific "tastes".
C++ is a package of FUD, well wrapped in a foil of vanity.
Ultimately, C++ designs can be simple and tidy. Even if the problems they attempt to model are complex, the solutions can be simple, easy to use, easy to understand, easy to maintain. They can be nonetheless extremely cluttered and complicated, and even "wrong" in a OO perspective, specially because OO is a design pattern particularly difficult to implement: writing bad code is not a problem specific to C++ itself.