I've noticed many questions on here from new programmers that can be solved using libraries. When a library is suggested, often times they respond "I don't want to use X library" Is it the learning curve? or ? Just curious!
Why do newbie programmers seem to shy away from libraries?
language-agnostic
Related Solutions
There are plenty of reasons why RAII isn't better known. First, the name isn't particularly obvious. If I didn't already know what RAII was, I'd certainly never guess it from the name. (Resource acquisition is initialization? What does that have to do with the destructor or cleanup, which is what really characterizes RAII?)
Another is that it doesn't work as well in languages without deterministic cleanup.
In C++, we know exactly when the destructor is called, we know the order in which destructors are called, and we can define them to do anything we like.
In most modern languages, everything is garbage-collected, which makes RAII trickier to implement. There's no reason why it wouldn't be possible to add RAII-extensions to, say, C#, but it's not as obvious as it is in C++. But as others have mentioned, Perl and other languages support RAII despite being garbage collected.
That said, it is still possible to create your own RAII-styled wrapper in C# or other languages. I did it in C# a while ago.
I had to write something to ensure that a database connection was closed immediately after use, a task which any C++ programmer would see as an obvious candidate for RAII.
Of course we could wrap everything in using-statements whenever we used a db connection, but that's just messy and error-prone.
My solution was to write a helper function which took a delegate as argument, and then when called, opened a database connection, and inside a using-statement, passed it to the delegate function, pseudocode:
T RAIIWrapper<T>(Func<DbConnection, T> f){
using (var db = new DbConnection()){
return f(db);
}
}
Still not as nice or obvious as C++-RAII, but it achieved roughly the same thing. Whenever we need a DbConnection, we have to call this helper function which guarantees that it'll be closed afterwards.
Best Solution
A lot of new programmers are still working at a very low level of abstraction, learning the trade. That's something everyone has to go through. It takes a while to "move up the stack" so to speak.
Once programmers realise that they spend most of the time solving the same problems as someone else already did, and the goal is to realise "business value", then they can really appreciate the value a good library brings.