I always wonder whether C++ syntax ever becomes readable when you sink more time into it, and if so - how much brain rewiring we would observe on a functional MRI.
In my opinion, C++ syntax is pretty readable. Of course there are codebases that are difficult to read (heavily abstracted, templated codebases especially), but it's not really that different compared to most other languages. But this exists in most languages, even C can be as bad with use of macros.<p>By far the worst in this aspect has been Scala, where every codebase seems to use a completely different dialect of the language, completely different constructs etc. There seems to have very little agreement on how the language should be used. Much, much less than C++.
It does... until you switch employers. Or sometimes even just read a coworker's code. Or even your own older code. Actually no, I don't think anyone achieved full readability enlightenment. People like me just hallucinated it after doing the same things for too long.
Sadly, that is exactly my experience.
And yet, somehow Lisp continues to be everyone's sweetheart, even though creating literal new DSLs for every project is one of the features of the language.
"using namespace std;" goes a long way to make C++ more readable and I don't really care about the potential issues. But yeah, due to a lack of a nice module system, this will quickly cause problems with headers that unload everything into the global namespace, like the windows API.<p>I wish we had something like Javascript's "import {vector, string, unordered_map} from std;". One separate using statement per item is a bit cumbersome.