C Slash C Plus Plus: The Complicated Relationship

The CS freshman starter pack is brutally accurate! They write "Hello World" once and suddenly have 4 programming languages on their LinkedIn. Their entire development environment consists of VS Code and GitKraken because the terminal is "scary." Their idea of deployment? Submitting assignments through Canvas. They'll spend hours hunting for that missing semicolon while sharing Boromir memes, and their entire personality revolves around the Minecraft-inspired "noob vs pro" dichotomy. The gatekeeping begins before they've even built anything substantial!

Ah, the sweet smell of revenge coding. This guy's building a music visualizer in raw C with FFT analysis, FFMPEG integration, and custom rendering—just to flex on React developers who'd need 17 npm packages and 3GB of node_modules to draw a circle. The best part? His audio visualizer actually looks pretty damn good. Nothing says "I've seen some things" like writing UI code that's closer to the metal than most devs will ever get. React devs frantically Googling "how to use pointers" as we speak.

The C++ compiler is basically the final boss of cryptic error messages. You ask a simple question: "Where's the problem in my code?" and it responds with a 47-line stacktrace pointing to a semicolon in a library you didn't even know you were using. Missing a bracket? Here's an error about template instantiation failure in line 4269 of some STL header. Segmentation fault? Good luck figuring out which of your 27 pointer dereferences caused it! The compiler doesn't just find your bugs—it wraps them in enigmas, stuffs them into riddles, and delivers them in ancient Sumerian. And you thought the compiler was there to help you...

Ah, the Rust evangelism strike force in their natural habitat. Above ground, we have the beautiful C language basking in the sunlight, nurturing an ecosystem that's been thriving for decades. Meanwhile, underground, the Grim Reaper himself is filming a documentary about the angry Rust crab that's convinced everyone C programmers are just one null pointer dereference away from total system collapse. After 20 years in this industry, I've seen this movie before. Some poor C dev is just trying to climb out of the pit while Rust zealots are down there with their memory safety pitchforks and ownership model torches. Sure, my code segfaults occasionally, but at least I don't have to fight the borrow checker at 3 AM while questioning my career choices.

Ah, the classic "two-week estimate" strikes again! Some poor project manager just claimed they can convert a 20-year-old C++ codebase to C# in just two weeks. Anyone who's ever touched legacy code knows that's like saying you'll clean the Augean stables with a toothpick. The king's response is the only reasonable one – crowning this developer as the new reigning champion of unrealistic expectations. This is why we drink so much coffee... and sometimes stronger stuff.

Buddy thinks he's using C++ in JavaScript because he's incrementing a variable with c++ in a for loop. That's like saying you're fluent in French because you can say "omelette du fromage." The bottom panel shows the appropriate response from seasoned developers - immediate physical violence. Nature is healing.