C++ Documentary

Hey folks,

I was debating whether or not to post this since we all love Zig and this is a Zig Forum, but I decided that it would be better for us to use this as a point of appreciation and reflection of history, and use that to continue to inspire our design direction and improvements in Zig.

So it seems that recently there was a new C++ Documentary that was funded and released a few days ago. I’m still in the middle of watching it, but it is well done and gives us a lot of historical background on what was happening at Bell Labs, the state of the world at that time, the computing scene within the US and specifically AT&T’s control on telecommunications and things with C++ as a language as well.

I’m definitely not a fan of C++ even though I used it a bit when I was growing up and it’s always been in the background in the computing world, same as C, ASM, and our ancestors FORTRAN/COBOL running in some old financial machine somewhere lol. But the documentary is definitely making me feel less dislike for it, and just be happier that it does exist, it does have its own history, and it’s definitely influenced us all in many ways, to the point where it annoy some folks enough that they made their own language (Zig, Go, Rust).

Hopefully everyone finds this enjoyable, and I would love to hear what you think and if you have any love/hate experiences with C++, and how that brought you over to Zig.

Jonathan

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The more I use Zig, the less I enjoy C++, but C++ is still what pays my bills, and my 15+ years of experience with the language mean I’m still very productive in it (even if I don’t like it so much anymore). I will definitely be watching the documentary! You cannot understand how Zig came to be without first understanding the history of computing

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I think there’s always something to be said for undstanding where a language came from, the historical context, and how it became what it is today. I had a similar feeling when listening to an interview with Brendan Eich about the story behind JavaScript.

Does it make me want to use JS any more than I have to? Nope. But it does make me a little more forgiving.