The trouble with I/O in C++

A common measure of a programming language's ease of use is what's called TTHW--"time to hello world." Many popular programming languages have a very low TTHW: in many scripting languages, such as Python and Perl, the "hello world" program is literally the single line: print "hello world".

C++ and its ancestor C are systems programming languages, which is to say that their primary concerns are with "power": control over the machine, speed, and (in C++'s case) the ability to leverage the type system with generic algorithms. This is a mixture of concerns not suited to small "hello world" programs.

The canonical "hello world" program in C is as follows:

    #include <stdio.h>

    int main()
    {
      puts("hello world");
    }

In C++, it is as follows:

    #include <iostream>

    int main()
    {
      std::cout << "hello world" << std::endl;
    }

The canonical C++ source code is not much longer than the canonical C source code, but it has...