C++26 for Lazy Programmers

Will Briggs — a University of Lynchburg computer science professor with three decades of experience teaching C++ — joins Todd L. Montgomery to talk through C++26 for Lazy Programmers, and the conversation opens on the question every language-learning book has to answer right now: does learning a language still matter when AI writes so much of the code?
Briggs' answer is refreshingly unhyped — he tests a new AI tool about once a year on a real, medium-difficulty problem, and as of this year's attempt, it still couldn't solve one, though it's genuinely useful for speeding up work he already understands. Both he and Montgomery land on the same practical conclusion: reading code fluently matters more now, not less, because code is increasingly how AI communicates back to you, and you can't debug or direct what you can't read. The rest of the conversation is a genuine craft discussion about how to teach C++ well — sequencing concepts so a beginner never has to hold two new ideas at once, giving double duty to topics like operator overloading and custom string classes, and deliberately introducing pointers nineteen chapters before ever using the word "pointer", by building the underlying mental model through arrays first.

For engineers who've been away from C++ or are watching it from a distance, there are a few sharp, specific takeaways: Briggs points to AI-generated C++ as noticeably more reliable than AI-generated Java, plausibly because of training-corpus quality rather than anything about the language itself, and he's blunt about C++26's biggest usability problem being proliferation, not power — he cites a case of 25 different ways floating around online just to initialize a single number, and argues the language needs fewer new ways to do old things. He also makes a case, backed by the TIOBE index, that C — a language from 1972 — is still the second most popular language in the world, and that learning C++ specifically (precisely because it's hard and concept-dense) is some of the best preparation available for picking up nearly any other language quickly afterward.