I am so glad I don't have to use C++ any more. I spent years in video games perfecting my programming skills in C++. What a waste of time. Now I'm in python I feel like I can program again.
Don't get my wrong. C++ obviously has it's place but I'm glad I'm in a different place right now.
I agree... I just wish Python's performance was closer to C++s. I use Python everyday for data analysis, etc... but I'm pretty much stuck with C++ for numerical simulations. Hopefully, the gap will become manageably small sometime soon.
I used to wish the same until I became a C# fan. If you'll ignore for a moment it's platform-specificness, it's a great compromise between Python (w/ regards to ease of use and productivity) and C++ (in terms of performance and some other things).
The bad news is, soon enough you'll realize that your entire codebase has been switched over to the extensions and Python isn't really doing anything anymore :)
People used to say something similar in games: 'Why write in C when you know you are going to have to move to asm anyway, just write it all in asm!'.
I've never seen more then 5% of c code usefully move to asm and I've never seen more then a few % of python code usefully move to a module. I am not saying it's always of waste of time it's just I haven't seen it.
Mainly in and around video games on PC/PS2/XBox/PS1. C/C++/ASM for the runtime (sometimes with python for scripting) and Python for level editing and build processes.
I'm not discounting python inadequacies esp when churning vast amounts of data. Video game levels are large and python was too slow to process collision maps, shadow maps etc but we added C modules to do the heavy work and it wasn't a lot of code to write in C (it was a pita to debug them though).
PS I don't work in video games any more so I've not experienced the delights of the PS3/XBox2 first hand. I do websites now... it's a lot easier :)
But on the other hand I guess that this "different place" means that you are now no longer programming serious video games. I know how it feels like - I'm looking around for other languages all the time and even did several smaller test-games in other languages. But for the real jobs I always fall back to c++. Mostly because of the 3D libraries in my case.
Don't get my wrong. C++ obviously has it's place but I'm glad I'm in a different place right now.