I've been programming in C++ for a little over a year, and according to you it's likely that I have yet to encounter any of the world-ending, flood-causing, tsunami stirring disastrous mistakes that you can make when writing C++. Which means, then, that none of these vague, non-specified horrors actually apply to a beginner. Right?

Wrong.
Just because you haven't seen the outcome of your mistakes does NOT mean you have not made them.
Welcome to C++ - when you do something wrong you don't always get tripped up on it.
Doesn't make what you did RIGHT it just means you've been lucky.

Does it sound vague as a reason? Yes.
Welcome to C++.

I haven't come across them yet, my life isn't a waking nightmare, and I enjoy C++ and coding games with it. So then how is it a bad language for beginners, exactly? I'll never understand this use of vague scare tactics to keep people from just trying the damn language out. Don't do it! There's stuff hidden! You're too stupid to make the mistakes, that's why you haven't made them yet!!!! Oh, well then I guess I'm all good then. And when I do make the mistakes, I'll probably do what you did: Learn from them.
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No, it is not a matter of 'being too stupid to learn from your mistakes' it is that C++ makes those mistakes hard to spot, hard to understand, vague due to the massive amount of 'undefined behaviour' which is allowed and more importantly makes the whole process of learning HARDER for BEGINNERS which implies, very heavily, that this is their FIRST language.

Which is why we advice against it and point out that C++ is a BAD language to start with - not that it is impossible but because you are making your life harder for yourself by trying to both learn to program AND learn to program around C++'s own vagueness and issues which is NOT helpful. C++ as a starting language WILL teach bad habits and WILL teach bad design - how do we know this? because we have seen it both in ourselves and many many times over the years.

Typical forum behavior. You see someone who's honest about their possible ignorance and try to inflate it to a size reasonable enough for you to discredit his opinions. Instead of arguing against what I say reasonably, you try to take away my voice by reminding me and everyone else that "You haven't been doing it enough yet to ruin everything." But as I've already shown, if I've been doing it a year and I still haven't encountered the horrors, that means beginners won't encounter the horrors until they're not beginners anymore. And even if I do find out something and want to switch languages, is that the death of my programming career? Is Java an entirely different world? Or Python? Or any other object-oriented language? Was my time spent with C++ wasted? Will I start from scratch? This is ridiculous.
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Yes, it is typical behavior of people who have more experiance than you in a subject.
You wouldn't take 1 year of a maths class and then declare that the maths behind QM is easy - nor to should someone who is, regardless of if your ego likes it or not, a beginner in the subject be saying 'oh, I've had no problems, it must be easy'.

Many people with many more years of experiance KNOW you are wrong by saying 'C++ is easy' so YES your lack of experiance IS important when giving advice to other people who are just starting out.

And no, it isn't rediculous it is advice given after years of experiance in both learning the language ourselves and watching others trying to learn it too. Your claim that it is easy and that everyone has to touch it at some point is the thing which is rediculous here.
(Also throwing around sentences like 'world-ending, flood-causing, tsunami stirring disastrous mistakes' in an attempt to make the person you are replying to look like they are over stating the problem is also rediculous and a tactic so transparent you'd have to be blind to not see through it.)

You want to learn C++? Fine. Great. Knock yourself out.
HOWEVER the moment you come here and claim it is 'easy' expect this reply because those of us who know better WILL take you to task on it because not doing so is a disservice to those who follow you and think 'oh hey, this random guy who has only been doing it for a year says it is easy so it must be!' and end up taking longer to learn to code than they might well have done with something like Python (and in many cases Python would have got them where they want to go faster and with less mess than trying to deal with C++).

@Shaquil: As a fellow C++ user myself, I know what you mean when you say C++ isn't as hard as everyone makes it out to be. C++ isn't "hard" to learn, but it is "harder" than other languages more suitable for a beginner. I learned C++ as my first language (and it's still my primary language), but I did so knowing it'll be harder than other easier alternatives like Python. So though I made that choice for myself, when people ask my recommendation for a beginner, I recommend Python.

One thing Python has over C++: Run-time interpretation, meaning no need to compile, meaning faster development time and easier experimentation for beginners trying to learn.

Why is C++ harder (though not "hard") that Python or some other languages?
1) It's more low-level, which requires more boilerplate to learn. It requires alot of, "Don't ask what this does, you'll learn about it later in the tutorials in chapter 27 - it just works, okay?".
Example:
std::cout << "Hello world!" << std::endl;

• Why is the bitshifting operator << being used here? Operator overloading, you'll learn about it later.
  
• What is the weird 'std::' or the 'using namespace std;' doing? Namespaces, you'll learn about them later.
  
• What is 'std::endl', and why am I printing it like text? It's actually a callback function being passed in to std::cout - you'll learn about how it works later.
  
• What is std::cout anyway? An ouput stream class inherited from ios inherited from ios_base - you'll learn about classes and inheritance later.
  
• Why are there brackets in std::vector<int> and what do they mean? Templates, you'll learn about them later.
  

This isn't bad, and will always be there to some extent (C++ just happens to have alot of that), but does add to confusion (and fear) in people learning it. I personally avoided templates for a long time, because I was afraid of them.
Note: I avoided using classes that use templates. I didn't actually write my own templated classes for even longer.

2) C++ also has alot of "Don't pay for what you don't need", which is one of it's strengths... but new programmers don't know about what they do need, and when they do know, they don't know it already exists and is waiting for them to use. How many C++ new users stick with char* strings because someone told them not to use std::strings, or because the API they use requires or returns char*, and they don't know they can convert to and from std::string?
How many manually use new and delete (because they saw someone else do it), when variables on the stack would be better in 90% of their cases, and shared pointers in the other 9%?

3) C++ is a great language. It is powerful, it is flexible, it is stable, it is fast. But it also requires you to have alot of knowledge about how and when to use what it offers, that requires alot more memorization for someone who is at the same time trying to learn programming in general. C++ has alot of features, and some non-uniform syntax issues, and so many corner cases and asterisks that a programmer won't learn for years before he suddenly encounters them. Even this week, I was surprised to find out (in a forum thread here by someone actually using them) that C++ allows 'and' and 'or' as keywords instead of the much more common && and || - and I've been programming C++ for 7 years.

The C++11 standard makes C++ much better for new (and old) users. But I can't truly recommend that to new users, because of a real lack of books and tutorials teaching beginners in the new C++11 way (there are some, but google will turn up way too many old C++ tutorials), and also, a lack of full support for C++11 from IDEs and compilers, though we are getting closer. When C++11 practices are mainstream in the C++ community, then it'll be much easier to recommend new programmers to start there. And even so, that'll make it (hopefully) even with Python in terms of friendliness to new programmers.

Learning Python teaches you the basics of programming in general, which when you do decide to pick up C++, makes it much easier. Also, you won't give up Python when you learn C++, you'll use them both. So it's not like it's wasted effort.

[quote name='Shaquil' timestamp='1347115335' post='4977987']
But when we're talking about making games, I reiterate, you're going to have to read some C at some point).

No you aren't.
There is no ultimate 'you must use a C language for making games' requirement anywhere.

People make games in Python, in C#, in Java, in JavaScript, in Lua and others without touching a line of C or C++.

If Python fits the need of the OP then there is NOTHING to be gained by going to a more complex language which is considerably more dangerous to use. And lets not fools ourselves here; C++ IS a complex language. Yes, you can use it for a year and go 'hey, there is nothing hard here..' but that's because you've been using it for a year and you've no idea what lurks in the darker areas of the language or how many mistakes you have already made which haven't come back to bite you yet.

At one year of using C++, more so if its your first language, I do not believe you are qualified to say how hard the language is. You are still very firmly a beginner and more than likely are making mistakes which you are lucky haven't blown up in your face yet. I work with professionals on a daily basis who have been using C++ (as well as many other languages; C++ is not an end point either, most professionals if any degree of skill will know a few languages and can switch between them at will) for years and still make mistakes which can lead to hours in a debugger tracking them down.

So no, C++ is not easy.
It might look easy but that's just because you don't know what you are doing wrong.
(and that's coming from someone with 10+ years of using the language behind them.)
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I know that from personal experience

In my opinion it depends on platform really, i would pick c# for windows because of XNA and its xbox and windows phone support while on others i would say python and pygame due to the simplicity of it of the day i have tested it.

Good luck

Typical forum behavior. You see someone who's honest about their possible ignorance and try to inflate it to a size reasonable enough for you to discredit his opinions. Instead of arguing against what I say reasonably, you try to take away my voice by reminding me and everyone else that "You haven't been doing it enough yet to ruin everything." But as I've already shown, if I've been doing it a year and I still haven't encountered the horrors, that means beginners won't encounter the horrors until they're not beginners anymore. And even if I do find out something and want to switch languages, is that the death of my programming career? Is Java an entirely different world? Or Python? Or any other object-oriented language? Was my time spent with C++ wasted? Will I start from scratch? This is ridiculous.

Yes, it is typical behavior of people who have more experiance than you in a subject.
You wouldn't take 1 year of a maths class and then declare that the maths behind QM is easy - nor to should someone who is, regardless of if your ego likes it or not, a beginner in the subject be saying 'oh, I've had no problems, it must be easy'.
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Did you honestly compare C++ to the mathematics behind Quantum Mechanics? I think that's a fitting end to this conversation.

Personally my idea that those so called 'easy languages' are a joke, they are not easy and allow you to screw up very badly as well. My programming history stated with BASIC on a commodore 64, although I never made any serious and larger projects back then. On the PC I started with visual basic, as that was suppose to be easy. Truth is, it's not. My first application made with VB crashed more often then the first project I made with C++, it didn't do what it was suppose to do in lots of cases and eventually got abandoned because the code base was simply unmaintainable. Clearly, choosing an 'easy language' here didn't help to guarantee the success of the project.

In my experience, the language is a minor factor in the learning curve, and your learning method and attitude are of major influence on how easy or hard it will be. Trying to take steps that are to large will undoubtedly result in failure, no matter the language. If you start with learning how to program by making a MMORPG, you will probably not succeed. However if you take small steps, using a good book or tutorial, you should be able to learn any language you want. With some languages you might be able to jump to get more results quicker, like jumping into 3D much faster, however as said this does not give guarantees for the success of the project, as going to fast in any language is bad.

In fact, it's very dangerous to use a so called 'easy language' in order to get results faster, as you may be rushing over the basic fundamentals and jump into GUI or 3D to fast, and eventually the project becomes unmanageable because you rushed over the fundamentals. I'm not saying you shouldn't use these languages, but not for the reason of being able to jump into 3D programming faster. While C++ might have it's raw memory management that needs to get used to (although you don't have to touch that for your first c++ program at all), but a garbage collector isn't something you don't have to understand either, it has several pitfalls and nasty side-effects (object resurrection anyone?) so also for managed languages you really have to understand memory management after all or your project will fail.

In the end, I would say if somebody wants to learn C++ straight away, let him. It may take longer to get a 3D scene up and running, but what is the use in quickly getting simple 3D scene up and running if you then have to throw away your code because you skipped the basics and the code is unmanageable and you have to start all over again rather then extend it into your game? You should set your goals straight, don't try to make a game if you want to learn how to program, learn to program instead. If your goal is to make a game rather then to learn how to program, then you shouldn't use C++, but neither should you use any other programming language, pick an engine with a ready-to-use level editor with a simple (preferably visual) scripting language that allows you to write small pieces of script logic, rather then whole programs. By writing small independent pieces of script code you don't have the risk of getting unmanageable code, as there is no direct relationship between the individual scripts, as with a whole program.

[quote name='phantom' timestamp='1347139809' post='4978107']
Wrong.
Just because you haven't seen the outcome of your mistakes does NOT mean you have not made them.

That is quite likely true. But the counter-argument is that having a language hold your hand is not very beneficial for your overall growth either. If you aren’t allowed to make mistakes, you aren’t able to learn from them.
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The problem is that until you see those mistakes you can't learn from them.

You can write C++ code which during an array traversal wanders out of bounds and gets away with it because you've been lucky. You never encounter the error, you never learn from it.
Something like C# is going to very quickly yell at you about doing so giving you a chance to catch the mistake and the algorithmic error which comes from it allowing you to learn.

It's about setting up solid foundations, the ability to reason about a problem and write the code without being tripped up by the little things along the way.

Once someone decides to learn to work with C++ this will give them a sound basis to work from when it comes to programming knowledge and make the transistion to the unprotected world of C++ easier.