Re: Y Store now C++

[Sundar Narasimhan <address@hidden>]

   What did they say?  What were the most important reasons proferred?

Most of them suggested that they'd either been told to learn it by
their pointy headed boss, or they'd run across it on their own in
their web wanderings (both of which made me change the picture of
bosses and unwashed programmers I'd previously subscribed to :). Most
of them fell in the camps of "I tried VB and couldn't hack a more
complicated project that I wanted to do" or.. "I am a C/C++ programmer
and man.. this stuff about getting rid of pointers is cool" or "I'm
taking an extension class, and people tell me that this is the best
language to start with because it's easy to get set up to code and
learn".

So the mental model I had at the time was
1. people getting tired of VB being inapplicable for complex projects
wanting to move up
2. people getting tired of C/C++ *issues* and wanting to simplify their
lives and move on
3. people learning a "new" language and camps 1. and 2. telling them
to do Java
4. opinion makers who'd decided that the costs / $$ were going to be
in Java for a variety of reasons and hence were telling their staff to
go learn them

4. has always been an important category for me (because they
controlled and control economic value chains, and actually make money
-- even today, as opposed to in the dot-com hype-ridden days). I can't
offer many words of wisdom about such people -- only that over time,
I've grown to be in the programmer demographic that views them as
smart and capable.. not at all stupid.