Thread: is C/C++ programming career is promising?

There are SO many factors that will affect the "correct" decision.

When you say you are in QA, is that in a software related role? Have you been writing any production quality code?

I find that learning languages is less of the task than learning "how to program" - whilst both are important, a new language can be picked up quite quickly. Learning how to do programming in general is much a longer task.

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Mats

If you want to get employed in the open source area, then you have a challenge ahead - not only in learning the language, but also getting the experience in working on open source projects.

You probably should start by looking at contributing to an existing [preferably small-ish] Open Source project.

Once you have proven yourself in that area, you are in a better position to get a job there.

Note that this is far from trivial.

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Mats

With the trend to use Java and .NET for applications, C and C++ are becoming more and more the languages used for systems programming only in the commercial software world. [ windows, OSX, Linux, *BSD ... ]

Open Source software will still use C and C++ more than the commercial softwae houses, but making a living from open source is far harder than from commercial or proprietary software.

C and C++ are becoming more and more the languages used for systems programming

I actually doubt that any of larger products will be built on .NET or Java (like Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Acrobat, Autocad etc).

In fact, the last releases of Photoshop and Autocad were only bugfixes and a lot better performance - not much new features. This shows that companies think performance is a very important issue, which means C and C++ will be still widely used in the future.

I think that .NET and Java are used for smaller commercial applications, that do less things, like little simple tools. I don't think .NET is gonna be used a lot in larger projects though.

Originally Posted by maxorator

I actually doubt that any of larger products will be built on .NET or Java (like Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Acrobat, Autocad etc)..

sorry to shock you, but Autocad is now .NET based, the 2007 release was the first version that required .net V2 to run.

Originally Posted by Jaqui

sorry to shock you, but Autocad is now .NET based, the 2007 release was the first version that required .net V2 to run.

Even though some parts of it require .NET (some GUI parts), almost everything else is in C++.

C and C++ are becoming more and more the languages used for systems programming

What about RT applications (like streaming etc)? I doubt Net or Java will be widly used for this purpose any time soon...

C/C++ Über Alles

Particularly in HPC C/C++ will always be the language of choice. No matter how fast java or any other language gets, C/C++ remain the most flexible general purpose language to date. Particularly with HPC this is an issue since most of the problems being solved are unique to begin with. So yeah I could learn java in half the time, which means if I stopped learnign C then in 10 years I woudl be as good at java as I am with C, or I could keep learnign C and in 10 years I could be 50% better than I am now. Its better to know one language well than 2 languages half ass.