> What the author was writing was very standard introductory C++ taught in pretty much every C++ intro book I read in the early 2000s. That doesn't make it invalid C++, it makes it, "an older idiom".
True. But that would suggest that we also consider Rust as it was taught in the early 2000s. I don’t think this would get us very far.
> The bigger question is, "Can C++ in the hands of a novice be as buggy as Rust in the hands of a novice".
Then it would be useful to firstly point out in the article that the matter of comparison is not the whole language but merely its usefulness to novices and to secondly consider the validity of such a comparison when deciding which language to use in a new project – if most people are novices for most of the time they use the language (e.g. in introductory numerical computing course), then clearly “novice friendliness” is a sensible measure, but otherwise it’s mostly a moot issue how hard the first two months are if you end up using it for the next ten years.
True. But that would suggest that we also consider Rust as it was taught in the early 2000s. I don’t think this would get us very far.
> The bigger question is, "Can C++ in the hands of a novice be as buggy as Rust in the hands of a novice".
Then it would be useful to firstly point out in the article that the matter of comparison is not the whole language but merely its usefulness to novices and to secondly consider the validity of such a comparison when deciding which language to use in a new project – if most people are novices for most of the time they use the language (e.g. in introductory numerical computing course), then clearly “novice friendliness” is a sensible measure, but otherwise it’s mostly a moot issue how hard the first two months are if you end up using it for the next ten years.