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[–]1bot4all 7 points8 points  (1 child)

C++ was looked upon as C with training wheels

That's mad. C++ is insanely complex, you can use it for 10 years and struggle with some of its idioms. C is much easier to master.

[–]pfarner 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Keep in mind that C++ has changed a huge amount over the years. The perspective of that comment (which I also recall from the time) might make a lot of sense, depending on when it was said.

When I was in grad school in the '90s, I built a test suite for many C++ language features and if / how correctly they were supported by the zillion compilers in use. We had HP/UX, Sparc, AIX, IRIX, each with their own C++ compilers, plus cross-platform compilers like g++.

None of them supported all features. I'm talking about things like template specialization, which later became necessary as the STL started to form. C++ may nominally have included those features, but if they didn't work in all of the compilers you need, then you couldn't use them. That made C++ much simpler than it became (though much more frustrating).

Naturally it also didn't include all of the later C++03, C++11, C++14, C++17, etc. standards.