How Do You Do That Voodoo That You Do?

Abstract

When I saw C++ source code for the first time, I became convinced that anyone able to write applications using this frightening language, which is full of curly brackets and pound signs, must have surely sold his soul to the devil. For, how else could a person use such an evil-looking tool for good? To go from the neat and clean syntax of Visual Basic to this complicated-looking language seemed an impossible task. However, my real aversion to C++ stemmed from the fact that at the time I did not understand that all programming languages served basically the same purpose: to enable programmers to give commands to a computer chip in a language both the programmer and the computer chip understand.