AI Cannot Replace Him

Nothing transforms a grizzled C++ veteran quite like discovering Bjarne Stroustrup's book has an anime girl on the cover. The pipeline from memory management hell to waifu wonderland is shorter than you'd think. Ten years of fighting segfaults and undefined behavior, only to be lured into the light by cute anime characters. The beard-to-catgirl pipeline is real, folks. The ultimate C++ optimization isn't move semantics—it's moving to a completely different aesthetic.

When your kid wants Scratch (the beginner-friendly block programming language) but you're a C programmer with trust issues and a weird sense of humor. This madlad literally redefined curly braces and brackets with ASCII art, then implemented FizzBuzz with them. It's the programming equivalent of making a sandwich with a chainsaw because "it gets the job done." The worst part? It probably compiles. That's the real horror story here.

Spend just a few minutes with C++ and you'll collect the complete trilogy: depression from memory leaks, violent rage from undefined behavior, and suicidal thoughts from template errors. The best part? You don't even need years of experience—these treasures are available to you within the first hour of compiling. And yet we keep coming back for more punishment because nothing says "real programmer" like manually managing your own memory while crying.

The Rust evangelism strike force claims another victim! Some poor soul dared to mention they're still using C/C++ in 2022, and now they're being lectured about Rust's memory safety features while their friends slowly back away. Classic language elitism in its natural habitat – because nothing says "I'm a modern developer" like making others feel bad about their tech stack choices. Meanwhile, the C++ devs are too busy fighting memory leaks to defend themselves.

The dark magic of build systems strikes again! Kitware, the company behind CMake, somehow claims 24 million users despite no one ever voluntarily identifying as a "CMake user." It's like that moment when you realize you've been drafted into an army you never signed up for. The Saruman imagery is perfect because using CMake feels exactly like staring into a mysterious orb that shows you cryptic error messages while slowly draining your will to live. We all just wanted to compile our code, but instead we're part of some grand arcane ritual.

Five identical orange cats labeled as different programming languages surrounding a loaf of bread labeled "HTML". Because let's face it, HTML isn't a real programming language - it's just bread. Delicious, structurally important bread that holds everything together, but still... just bread. Meanwhile, all the "real" programming languages are basically the same cat in different moods. Sure, they'll hiss and scratch at each other about which one is superior, but deep down they're all just orange cats doing cat things with slightly different attitudes.