Is it really C++, or "C with classes", though?

Not any more than owning a chisel makes you a sculptor. If I had a dime for every init() method I've seen ...

I propose we adopt "mass of Mt Everest" as a new Slashdot standard of measument - measuring mass in Libraries of Congress was always awkward.

I believe the mass of Mt Everest estimate is correct for the Earth-destroying black hole - it's the point at which matter infall at the density of the Earth's interior exceeds Hawking radiation. In a vacuum, the magic mass is about the mass of the moon - the point at which the Hawking radiation is cooler than the CMBR, and so you won't have a net loss for 10^lots years.

(You can't "compile with RAII turned off", as RAII is a coding style: you're probably thinking of RTTI. But the RAII style might not be good for a realtime system, as it can hide expensive work to release resources.)

The abomination that is Google's C++ coding conventions is why I hang up on their recruiters. (Though I hear an internal war has been raging for a couple years within Google over their 80s-night coding conventions). Actually, I'm not sure what's you'd use from C++ beyond "C with classes" if you're writing C-style code. If you're not comfortable with exceptions, and are following an "allocate at the top, clean up at the bottom, never return from the middle" mindset, C++ is damned awkward - you won't be using the standard libraries much, you won't have non-trivial constructors, and so on.

Oh fuck yes. But that's easy to explain to a new-hire - it's just a tedious convention, not really a mindset thing. IMO, the single most annoying flaw in C++ was not making all members and parameters "const&" by default. (Passing an int by value instead of by const reference is just the optimizers business, not a semantic change). I'd much rather declare the non-const exceptions!

And while I'm wishing, C++ really needs C#-style properties - a way to optionally intercept "foo.bar = 4" to add a non-trivial setter, without cluttering code with getBar() and setBar() functions "just in case".

That's just, like, your opinion man!

Seriously, though, C++ was never intended to be "C with a little extra", but instead a Java-like (but native code) language with backwards compatibility with existing C code. You can see that throughout Stroustrup's writings, including how he says C++ should be taught (start with std::vector and std::string - don't even teach arrays and char* until people have the basics internalized).

IMO, C++ properly written is a better Java - no worries about resource cleanup (Well, now Java has try-with-resources, so it's not so bad), vastly less boilerplate, a great standard algorithms library, and so on. Java's advantage is in its easy learning curve, and standard cross-platform libraries, which led to a vast selection of open-source tools. If the C++ standard had included more cross-platform system libraries earlier, Java might not have the library advantage. While C++ finally has threading in the STL, it's missing so much other systems-level stuff. But at least I can have a freaking unsigned int in C++ if I want to!

As others have pointed out: the "pedestrian detection" feature is completely unrelated to self parking. That feature would not have engaged here. Self-parking already checks for obstacles, but if the driver asserts control, self-parking lets the driver drive. And that's what happened here - the idiot drove into people.

Vastly more: almost every "unintended acceleration" in history had in fact been "pedal misapplication". Why admit fault when you can just sue someone for a pretend-faulty product/.

For non-ducks, the most important things to know about C++ aren't list in the summery: RAII and shared_ptr<T>

C++ is not C. C++ written like C tends to be crap code - just an overly complex and distracting language for that coding style. If C++ is the right tool for the job, you need to be using a coding style very similar to C# and Java: throwing exception when errors are encountered, writing exception-safe code all the time, returning from functions in the middle, and never, ever, worrying about cleaning up at the bottom of a function what you allocate at the top.

If all of that sounds wrong to you, congrats, you're a C coder, and there's nothing wrong with that. Good C code is good code. But C++ is designed to be used with "scoped objects", that is, every object cleans itself up when you exit scope, so you really have to internalize the tools for that, and that mindset.

So you're saying that our educational system should focus on not leaving any children behind? What a startlingly original idea - I can see no flaw in that plan!

I think that mixing the smart kids in with everyone else is just misguided in the first place - that it's a passing symptom of the "participation trophy" culture (which has IMO passed it's peak and already started the other way). Do you think the old-school system would work well if it were all smart kids?

IMO it would - it would in fact let you socialize properly with people smart enough to get your jokes (or at least, that was always my problem). And the nice part is: it scales down well - for smaller schools who otherwise couldn't make a gifted&talented program work, combing a few grades just might. I know I was greatly held back because I didn't have other smart kids to mentor me - my parents gave 0 fucks about my education, and before the internet, in a small town with a crappy library, well, self-education sucked.

Musk isn't a politician, and this isn't a new idea. The current, regimented-by-grade system was explicitly invented to train kids to be good little manufacturing workers (back when those were the bast jobs most people could get, it was a good enough plan). But before that, before we twisted the educational system into a manufacturing-job-training system, you didn't divide kids up by age like we do today.

The old way had the teacher directly teach the older kids an the age rage, who would then be responsible for teaching the younger kids themselves. This is a great system: you learn better through mentoring, you develop better critical thinking skills when the person teaching you is sometimes wrong, and you likely develop leadership skills along the way.

There may be a better system for the modern era, but the old-school (heh) system seems vastly better than what we have.

You design systems to be robust in terms of the components behaving badly. Any fool can design a system that works if the components all work the way you'd like them to.

CIO is an "IT" Job. That's a shitty career, but we were discussing software development. But if you work for Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, probably just as many big names I've forgotten, there is a technical track that leads there in the second half of your career. Those jobs are quite rare so far, as so few devs are over 40 still, and will likely never be more than the top 5% (of the few who can make it in those companies to begin with), but still, it is a path. I know people in that pay grade at 4 of those companies.

Of course in banking, you have to be deep into investment banking or a quant to make good money, and just like being an ER doc: no matter how good the pay is, you won't do it for long.

Yes, dentists are well paid - eventually - but they start earning late, a few years after a software dev, they have a much larger school debt to pay off, and just like a software dev, the early years don't pay so well.

You can't just look at peak earning power, but at lifetime earnings at a given age, and it takes a long, long time for a dentist or doctor to pull ahead. BTW, you can certainly make $300k as a software dev at a big company - that's common for tech track paygrades equivalent to a second-level manager at the big names. Of course, there are far fewer such positions than there are dentists in America, and for someone capable of both I'd recommend dentistry, but the gap isn't as big as you might think.