Joel Spolsky characterized C++ as "enough rope to hang yourself". Actually, he was summarizing "Effective C++" by Scott Meyers: It's a book that basically says, C++ is enough rope to hang yourself, and then a couple of extra miles of rope, and then a couple of suicide pills that are disguised as M&Ms... I don't have a copy of the book, but there are indications that much of the book relates to pitfalls of managing memory which seem like would be rendered moot in C# because the runtime manages those issues for you. Here are my questions: Does C# avoid pitfalls that are avoided in C++ only by careful programming? If so, to what degree and how are they avoided? Are there new, different pitfalls in C# that a new C# programmer should be aware of? If so, why couldn't they be avoided by the design of C#?