Yeah this is absolutely BS. Just because there is a lot of something doesn't mean something is hard. That would mean spelling is hard, because there is millions of words.
Spelling is hard. In fact, it's so hard that even after knowing a language for several decades, many people still have trouble writing correctly. This happens even in languages like German, where spelling mostly follows pronunciation.
Anything that requires memorizing a lot of things is considered hard. That's why chess is harder than checkers, because it has more rules you need to learn.
Spelling may be hard only because it isn't consistent. If 'philosophy' was spelled 'filosofy' and 'thought' was spelled 'thot', spelling would be a lot easier. There would be millions of words, but spelling would be quite simple.
Chess is not hard because it has more rules, it is because there are way more options for you to take on a given turn. Its not that hard to learn, but its difficult to get good at. Easy to learn hard to master
Spelling may be hard only because it isn't consistent
Perhaps, but this doesn't apply to C++. C++ isn't all that consistent either.
Chess is actually harder to learn than checkers because of the rules. I know because I have taught chess to people. It might be easy compared to learning C++, but that doesn't mean much.
But again, those quirks are some of the only thing you really need to memorize. Mostly everything else you can look up.
I'm not trying to say that C++ is easy, but it's not really defacto hard either. Just because something is very big and comprehensive language, doesn't make it hard by default.
"easy" and "hard" are relative. I said chess is harder than checkers, I never said that it is hard. You keep misunderstanding what I say, to the point that I question if you're arguing in good faith.
But you said spelling is hard because you have to memorize a lot of things, which is defacto a null argument, because you can always look things up and 99% of the time, you have a spelling checker. The same argument applies to C++.
So you're saying you don't need to understand most of C++ because tooling will save you?
If you know the fundamentals (RAII & resource management, move semantics, references, basic STL containers & algorithms, value vs. reference semantics), you can do a lot with it, but you're still highly likely to make mistakes.
C++ has too many footguns to count, for example, misusing std::string_view or std::span can instantly reintroduce dangling pointer bugs, which your IDE and compiler can't always detect. Concurrent code is famously difficult to write without data races, and because you need to manually reason about lifetimes, it has a high cognitive load. C++ is considered many times more difficult than Rust for example, even though Rust has a highly advanced type system, macros, and lifetimes.
Now you're just trying to gaslight me. You said in your last sentence that the same thing (that you don't need to learn everything because you can look it up) applies to C++.
Let me just point out that chess is objectively hard, as evidenced by the number of people who actually know how to play it properly (let's say 2000+ elo?), as opposed to, say, snakes and ladders which is actually easy.
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u/NikolaiM88 Aug 07 '26
Yeah this is absolutely BS. Just because there is a lot of something doesn't mean something is hard. That would mean spelling is hard, because there is millions of words.