On October 12th, we opened the fall conference season with PlovDev – a conference that aims to strengthen the IT community. I was one of the speakers, and my presentation was on the topic “The Strength and Weakness of C++”.
I had noticed over the years that there are programmers who underestimate C++ or are afraid of it. And others use it in a way that actually harms the projects they work on. So I wanted to show the listeners the strengths of the language and how to use them in their practice. At the same time, I wanted to show them the weaknesses of the language and how to use them to the benefit of their work. The main idea that I wanted to show is very well described in this text:
Freedom is a fundamental concept in the C++ language.
- It has all the features, but never forces programmers to use them. You can choose to program in all sorts of ways, such as: assembly language, structured, object-oriented, functional, meta, mixed, etc…
- You can turn everything off. If you don’t want object-oriented programming, you can use a subset of C. If you want to turn off STL and use Boost C++ libraries, you can do that. If you want to turn off the C++ runtime – you can do that.
C++ treats you like a grown-up person.
C++ gives you enormous power.
And with enormous power comes enormous responsibility.
Here is the presentation itself in PDF format. And this is a video recording of the presentation.
The conference was very interesting with topics that touched on different areas of programming. I met people from different cities of the country, we exchanged ideas or just chatted.
I thank the organizers for the perfect organization and I hope that there will soon be new editions that will popularize good practices in programming.
Here are some photos from the conference
