Re: [Boost-users] Getting started with Boost: what did you need to know?

On 01/02/06, David Abrahams wrote:

Chris Goller writes:

...

I know everytime I did something new with boost, I caught myself saying, "C++ is so freaking cool."

Could you give a few examples? When you've been around Boost and C++ as long as I have, you tend to lose touch with what will wow people. It would be really helpful to know what kinds of things you did that made you say that.

For me it was discovering Boost.Lambda. I had learned bind1st and bind2nd and really didn't understand why this functional programming was such a big deal since it was just so messy. Just a simple sort( c.begin(), c.end(), *_2 < *_1 ) really drives home the brilliance of Lambda for me. Functional-style programming just started making sense, and I realised how incredibly cool it was that this could be done in C++ with no specific language support. Of course then Lambda got upgraded ( or maybe I just hadn't found it before ) to include switches and conditionals and exceptions and nearly everything you can do in C++ and I got amazed again. ~ Scott McMurray