[boost] Re: Re: Boost to the rescue

From: Fernando Cacciola (fernando_cacciola_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-04-15 13:39:06

Well, in my country (Argentina) C++ programmers are the geeks of geeks in 
our software industry. Pretty much every job around is for for JE22, VB, and 
at most, some _old_ C/C++ for some legacy systems. In these lands, being a 
booster means close to nothing (to the Industry)... I even feel that the 
same nothing would mean to be, say, a commitee member :-)

I'm afraid that C++ is largely _percieved_ as esoteric, complicated and 
unworthty worldwide.

For more than a year I've been professionally coding only in C# just becasue 
the team I got involved into, based in the US, prefered to stay away from 
C++. I've been trying to dilude all those fears and maybe, if we were to 
start from scratch, we could do it C++, but when I joined C++ was like black 
magic.
Similarly, about a year ago I joined a worldwide team (with people mostly in 
the US and Europe) that intended to develop _games_ in anything but C++ (can 
you believe it!). They purposedly insisted on avoiding C++, pretty much all 
of them! I tried and tried to bring them to their senses, by showing them 
that this particular industry was born from C an beyond, but it was 
fruitless.. but, well, they picked Delphi, even over C# and besides my 
strong suggestion, so what can I say...

Before I quit my old job, about two years ago, we looked for a 
replacement... we seeked for many months, until we got tired of trying to 
get someone with some degree of _modern_ C++ knowledge... none of the 
"senior C++ programmers" interviewed knew about Boost, or at most they 
merely heard of it but never really used it... eventually, we got to the 
ONLY one person who at least really knew about STL... but it took us months 
to find him!!

[I know all this is OT but I think is nice to raise the head up for a minute 
and see that we're a rare niche]

Fernando Cacciola