Linus shouldn't talk about something he doesn't understand. He couldn't have found a better way to advertise his ignorance about C++ to the whole world than this.

He is telling the whole world that "Hey, here I am, you know, the guy who created the linux kernel, the best designed piece of software in the whole universe(don't listen to Tanenbaum though, he didn't learn OS fundamentals), so you better listen to me when I say that C++ _sucks_. Don't give me the BS about how so many large applications have been created in it, because they would have been only better had they been created in C(it's a magical language btw, solves _all_ your problems in the blink of an eye). If you go and read about people like Stroustrup, Sutter, Alexandrescu, Koening, Thomas etc, take it from me that they missed lot of their CS clases, so they don't know a thing about programming. How do I know? They use C++!"

Sage Linus at one point or the other has to wake up to the fact that he is not the guru of all things that is programming and his opinion of the C++ language is taken as seriously as that of my hair dresser.

Lets face facts - there is no one perfect programming language. It is possible to write beautiful Assembler and ugly C++. The language is just a tool. My personal preference for when I have to get down and dirty is Assembler. This stems, no doubt, from the fact that the first programming language I learn was IBM 360 Assembler. The second was COBOL. If the count of large successful projects is how we determine what is the best language then COBOL wins. My preference for writing new code is straight C. Yes, it WILL let me dig a hole and bury myself. But it also lets me to write what I want and it assumes that the programmer knows what he (or she) is doing.

It's always somewhat entertaining to watch programmers stroke their own egos. People like Linus Torvalds, Paul Graham, and few notable other like to hop up on their digital pedestal and proclaim down to the unwashed masses that everything that they say, in their infinite wisdom, is canon.

Linus' thread is nothing but FUD and virulent opinion. STL and Boost are convenience libraries certainly. It's my conjecture that they weren't designed for system-level type project. They help to make some aspects of programming easier and the abstractions that they provide are adequate. They are designed to be general purpose because the authors of STL and Boost can't possibly take into account every possible consideration that someone might have. They picked the lowest common denominator. If you need something specialized -- you write something specialized simple as that.

Additionally, judging the merits of a language based on the libraries that it has is pointless. Comparing "C" to "C++ & STL" is equally arbitrary and is an apples to oranges comparison that does nothing but make the person doing the comparison look as though they can't differentiate between the language and libraries that are implemented in said language.

Finally, I especially take offense to the denigration of C++ (or any programming language ) by basing the quality of a language on the quality of its users. That's about as dumb as me saying "Trucks are stupid. The features that they add over cars are crap and poorly thought out, in my highly exalted opinion. They are especially useless because their drivers keep crashing them" (I'm sure this analogy is broken, but I hope you get my point).

It's a guilt by association fallacy and an ad hominem attack all rolled into one. Celebrity programmer do nothing but piss me off.

I recently inherited a C++ application that I've had to modify. It has been a baptism of fire... I've plenty of coding experience, mostly on VB and .NET so I know what I look for in a language. I found C++ like going on a trip to the middle ages, it's full of antique syntax and utterly alien concepts. A good example is allocating memory... I dont know if that is common in C++ but why on earth do I have to do stuff like that? I just expect any modern language/platform to handle that kind of stuff seemlesly and behind the scenes. I want to get on with coding my app and not deal with the mundane chores that I have to semm to have to explicitly code, or get from add-on engineered libraries.

Simple tasks like opening and reading a file involve obtuse syntax and lots of potential for error. It shouldn't be like that in 2008! We have moved forward, and C++ should, IMHO be consigned to the home for retired languages. It had its day, but that has gone... time to move on..