Can I go back?

Another article unrelated to Ubuntu. Maybe I should start a new blog...

Recently I started coding in C++ again. Over the last year since I've been out of university, I've been working primarily with PHP and Ruby for both personal and professional projects. In my last year of university, I didn't really do much programming as my courses were either in economics (I was planning on transferring but the money in computers told me not to) or high-level comp-sci/math courses where you're past the stage of coding everything and you're busy figuring out whether or not the program that you want to code is actually code-able or not and if so, will it finish by the time your grandkids are in the retirement home.

So back to C++. It is wonderful and painful at the same time. After working with Ruby, the thought of not having functions as first-class values, conditional assignments and if/unless statements after a statement is near-crippling (I realize now that in high-school and first year I was a Blub Programmer, am I still one?). But working with pointers again and manual memory management makes me feel like I'm actually doing something. If only there were a language where I can have both pointers AND anonymous functions. Maybe with some good type-inferencing like in Scala. There probably is one, but I don't know about it. It is my new mission to find out.