>If you don't yet understand why GC increases productivity, it's an epiphany you'll need to look forward to.
Oh I fully understand/agree with that, I just don't find C++ memory management to be too hard. The concurrency concerns pointed out by others are true, though. Whether they (the concerns) are offset by the lack of deterministic destruction and the extreme triviality of creating reference chains that root things far longer than needed due to the root being live while the rest of the chain should be dead, is another question.
As you pointed out, in some domains transactional code is fairly straightforward, or at least tractable without inducing massive depression. In some other domains, not so much :)
The domain of programs for which C++ memory management is not hard has only a partial intersection with programs that are small, expressive and easy to understand.
That is, if you take C++'s techniques for memory management for granted, simpler approaches to problems won't even occur to you.
Oh I fully understand/agree with that, I just don't find C++ memory management to be too hard. The concurrency concerns pointed out by others are true, though. Whether they (the concerns) are offset by the lack of deterministic destruction and the extreme triviality of creating reference chains that root things far longer than needed due to the root being live while the rest of the chain should be dead, is another question.
As you pointed out, in some domains transactional code is fairly straightforward, or at least tractable without inducing massive depression. In some other domains, not so much :)