There’s a good thread over at Advogato on why C++ hasn’t seen wider adoption among free software programmers. The consensus seems to be that the compilers suck, it doesn’t work very well across platforms, and the language is too complex. I find this interesting, because C++ is probably the next thing for me to learn now that I’d rate myself as a competent Java programmer. However, given that it’s not popular in the free software world and seems overly complicated, I think I’ll probably skip it. What I really like to do is program in Perl, anyway, although it’s pretty easy to write code that pleases me aesthetically in Java.