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From: Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid>
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Subject: Re: The greeting code in Java
Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2011 16:25:54 -0400
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On 06/19/2011 10:17 AM, Saeed Amrollahi wrote:
> Well, in the case of C++ code, I have to
> explain cin, cout, string and two overloaded operators:>>  and<<
> in the case of java one: I have to
> explain, the stream class hierarchy, InputStreamReader,
> BufferedReader,
> in, string, new operator, final, the meaning of buffered,
> readLine, ...

If that is what you're explaining in Java, you also need to explain for 
C++ stack constructed-objects, references, #include (trust me, beginners 
can get very confused about #include, as simple as it looks), and 
probably the entire iostream interfaces if you're talking about Java's 
stream class hierarchy.

> I believe the C++ code is simpler for a beginner.

If it's simpler, it's only superficially so. C++'s interfaces heavily 
optimize for the most common case and render the development of the more 
critical components inordinately more difficult. For example, a fair 
amount of my work has to worry about the use of international characters 
and multiple charsets (it's not unimaginable that I have to use one 
stream to write in two simultaneous charsets (i.e., the control protocol 
is in UTF-8 but I send 8-bit MIME payloads of ISO 8859-1)). In Java, I 
can keep both the raw Stream and a controlling Reader/Writer around and 
use the character-based one for control information and the octet-based 
one for data payloads.

And, naturally, any talk of C++ being simpler becomes hard to stomach 
once you introduce templates, i.e., any use of the STL. std::string 
isn't actually a class, it's actually std::basic_string<char, 
std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, as every error message 
involving std::set<std::string> will helpfully inform you. I mean 
std::set<std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, 
std::allocator<char> >, std::less<std::basic_string<char, 
std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >, 
std::allocator<std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, 
std::allocator<char> > > >. Have fun debugging your template errors!

-- 
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not 
tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth