I'm sure you're right. Tailgaters too.

I've been doing C++ on and off for more than 20 years (mostly on) and just for that, I'm going to have to friend you.

Wow, so one of their major goals is to release something people actually want to upgrade to.

Way to set your sights low, Microsoft.

Perhaps you should admit that Metro was nothing other than your executives suffering from collective lust explosion over Apple taking 30% off the top of every app sale and hoping that MS could force Windows users into the same situation.

We have all that, but not the automated tests for the stuff I'm involved with (other departments probably do). It's something my manager has been making a push for in the past few months (and I'm totally on board with), but it's going to take a lot of time because of the sheer amount of legacy code.

Then there are all the incentives to make traffic worse... stop light cameras that generate revenue but don't increase safety because the yellows are too short. Or the urban legend that shopkeepers push to get lights timed so more cars are stopped out in front of their shops, an idea that's believable, although I don't know if it's true. Then of course, there are bad driving habits, and the fact that one tailgater or one slowpoke can cause major cascades that lead to huge backups (and I'm not talking about accidents).

I'm a developer. Honestly, I've never worked anywhere that did much in the way of automated testing. It's something that's always bugged me and something I've always pushed for.

As a former violist, I heartily endorse your comment.

Heh. I'm tempted to say that with C++ you can get a huge unreadable mess of error messages, but with Java, the huge unreadable mess you get is the code, but that's not fair to the language.

I've been doing C++ on and off (mostly on) for 20 years. I'm on the fence about whether or not it's great. I definitely like it, and I think the right subset of C++ is great, but the right subset changes over time (e.g., you couldn't have paid me to use templates and STL 12 years ago), but now I couldn't live without them, and it definitely changes for different people.

In fact, it really is the language's problem. C++ in its entirety is just too complex, and therefore, depending on the code, it can be way too hard to deal with. Of course, Java is a much simpler language and you can hardly do a Google search without seeing someone complain about how so much Java code is like dealing with the Soviet bureaucracy (an accurate description in my experience). I guess C++ makes good developers better and bad developers worse... and that is because of the language.

My language of choice these days would be Python and if I do anything for fun, it's with Python. I think Python is a far more elegant language, as well as simpler than C++, but doesn't lack the ability to be really expressive, usually with much less code. There are obviously issues with Python, too, it's not my intention to start a flame war, but as much as I like C++, I think a lot of its problems _are_ the fault of the language.

> Misplace a semicolon in a non-trivial meta-program or dsl in C++

Well, I see one obvious problem here...

Programming is math, I agree. But doing anything productive with code someone else has written is most definitely an art.

Science, industry - or is it really an art?

I've been doing it for more than 25 years... I consider it a vice.

"Automated unit tests"... I thought those were just a myth. Are you sure you're in the Real World?

And don't get me started on "enterprise" software. I've almost never seen "enterprise" software that was worth the disk space it took up. We can complain all day about how bad Windows or Office, etc., is but compared to "enterprise" software, those products are amazingly good and user-friendly.

I can assure you that when "Star Wars" was first shown in theaters, there was no mention of "Episode IV". That was a later addition.

Yes, because streaming music into your car sound system will instantly kill you.