Most people will agree that C++ is a fairly complex language. But just how complex is it? I got curious about quantifying that by comparing the number of concepts a programmer has to understand to learn a programming language in its entirety.

Concepts in my definition include large categories like classes and operators, as well as more fine grained things like if-else statements and while loops. There is a lot of variation in the complexity of different concepts, so their number can only serve as a rough measure of language complexity. Nevertheless, I think it’s interesting.

I chose C++, CoffeeScript and Ruby …