It's a curious thing, technology exposure and ending up using — and being limited by — what you know exists.
I remember getting an Amiga in the early 1990s. I had programmed in assembly language on the C64, so on the Amiga I learned the Motorola 68000 assembly language, of course. I didn't know any other type of programming (other than BASIC). I had heard about C, but I didn't know people used it to write software on the Amiga. I remember buying a book about Intuition (the AmigaOS windowing system) and trying to figure out how to call the APIs from assembly language, which was of course fruitless, as I didn't even know how about the concept of linking, let alone how to look up library functions from assembly. Nobody had told me about C!
So I was a Windows person in the 1990s because that was the thing people used at home, and it was natural for me to use Delphi, not C++. I had looked at C++, but the possibility of using C++ for my projects never really struck me. Delphi was such a phenomenally productive tool. Windows seemed like the only viable platform. A lot of people are exposed to UNIX in university, but I didn't go there, so my first taste of UNIX was (aside from Amiga) Linux.
I agree with you about C++. I've had fun writing Go, but it feels like a stopgap solution until the real next-level language appears. Rust, maybe. Nimrod does look cool.
I remember getting an Amiga in the early 1990s. I had programmed in assembly language on the C64, so on the Amiga I learned the Motorola 68000 assembly language, of course. I didn't know any other type of programming (other than BASIC). I had heard about C, but I didn't know people used it to write software on the Amiga. I remember buying a book about Intuition (the AmigaOS windowing system) and trying to figure out how to call the APIs from assembly language, which was of course fruitless, as I didn't even know how about the concept of linking, let alone how to look up library functions from assembly. Nobody had told me about C!
So I was a Windows person in the 1990s because that was the thing people used at home, and it was natural for me to use Delphi, not C++. I had looked at C++, but the possibility of using C++ for my projects never really struck me. Delphi was such a phenomenally productive tool. Windows seemed like the only viable platform. A lot of people are exposed to UNIX in university, but I didn't go there, so my first taste of UNIX was (aside from Amiga) Linux.
I agree with you about C++. I've had fun writing Go, but it feels like a stopgap solution until the real next-level language appears. Rust, maybe. Nimrod does look cool.