Is It All C? (Always Has Been)

The classic "things are easy when you've mastered them" pattern. Experienced C++ devs saying pointers aren't hard is like billionaires claiming money doesn't matter or supermodels saying looks are irrelevant. Meanwhile, the rest of us are still trying to figure out why our program just segfaulted because we dereferenced a null pointer for the 17th time today. Sure, pointers are "easy" after you've spent 5 years debugging memory leaks and dangling references.

Oh snap! ChatGPT out here teaching C programming like it's handing out candy! 🍬 The joke is that when someone says "ChatGPT is useful for beginners," ChatGPT responds with some hardcore C code using malloc() to allocate memory for a string. That's like saying "swimming is easy" and then throwing someone into the deep end with sharks! Memory management in C is basically the final boss of programming that makes grown developers cry. Nothing says "beginner-friendly" like manual memory allocation that can crash your entire system if you forget to free it later! 💀

Finally, someone said the quiet part out loud. Every time management pushes for a shiny new tech stack, my bank account feels a disturbance in the force. That moment when your 15 years of C++ wizardry becomes less valuable than a junior who completed "Rust in 30 Days" on Udemy. Memory safety? More like salary safety... for the company. The tech industry's greatest magic trick: convincing us that rewriting perfectly functional systems is about "innovation" rather than resetting the salary clock. Same playbook as when they renamed "programmers" to "software engineers" to "developers" to "ninjas" - different title, same work, fresh salary bands. Guess I'll start learning Rust while updating my LinkedIn to "Blockchain AI Quantum Rust Developer" to stay relevant until the next language comes to destroy my market value.

Top panel shows assembly code with "is0dd" function checking if a number is odd by bitwise operations. Bottom panel shows someone who skipped all that and just lit up LEDs on a breadboard. Why write complex bitwise logic when electricity already knows if a current is odd or even? The universe's physics engine doesn't need your fancy algorithms - electrons have been doing modulo operations since the Big Bang.

Ah yes, the classic "let's handle years with a switch statement" approach. Some poor developer back in 1999 was like: switch(year) {   case 2020: // pandemic mode   case 2021: // still pandemic   case 2022: // recovery mode   case 2023: // normal-ish   case 2024: // election chaos   // TODO: add more years later   default: trainControl.panic(); } And then they quit, got promoted, or died before anyone remembered to add 2025. Twenty-five years after Y2K and we're still writing software like time is a finite concept. This is why we can't have nice things... or functioning trains, apparently.

The excitement-to-disappointment pipeline is real. You spend hours hunting for that perfect C++ feature to solve your problem, only to discover it's coming in C++26... which is years away. It's like finding out the solution to your current deadline is scheduled to arrive sometime after your retirement. The crushing realization that you'll have to implement your own janky workaround (again) instead of using that shiny new linear algebra library. Welcome to C++ development, where the future is always bright but perpetually out of reach.