oh wow MQL5 is a mindtrip /rant

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OK, I'm new'ish'. I just spent a month learning MQL4, and by and large it seemed fairly intuitive to me (i do have some coding background). It took me a month; but I was flying..... Then the trading system/broker that I use 'updated' to MT5 last week so I have to update my scripts to be MT5 compatible. I didn't think that would be 'too much' of an issue.... however...

Holy wow potatoes, it feels like it's convoluted, complicated, and I have to relearn everything all over again.

Why (actual question, not just a rhetorical one) why do we require external libraries for calls that 'in my mind' would be better served as internal functions? That seems crazy to me - or maybe I'm an ijit and I just don't understand the advantages?
I've never liked external libraries - I DO (did) have a bunch of my own for custom functions and indicators, but that's fair IMO. why does MQL5 need external libraries for things that to me look like they should be native? It's an issue because I'm lazy and I'd like the learning or upgrade system from 4 to 5 to be simple; and as far as I can tell, it's not.

I mean, I could be doing it wrong, for a certainty; but like I said, I learned almost the entirety of MQL4 in about 3 weeks. In 3 days of messing with MQL5 and I still can't make heads or tails of what's going on.

What am I missing? how is this supposed to be better?
 
there are a lot of native libraries, I don't know what external libraries you could possibly need unless you're creating something completely new
 
Conor Mcnamara #:
there are a lot of native libraries, I don't know what external libraries you could possibly need unless you're creating something completely new

In just 3 weeks you learnt entirely MQL4? It seems like you were already having knowledge of C++

If you learnt in 3 weeks, Learning MQL5 should not be tough for you, give another 3 weeks to learn MQL5

 

MQL5 is only rocket science at first. All the weird stuff pieces together eventually.

Do not go to AI. Learn from the example codes written by Metaquotes as your starting point.

 
Conor Mcnamara #:

MQL5 is only rocket science at first. All the weird stuff pieces together eventually.

Do not go to AI. Learn from the example codes written by Metaquotes as your starting point.

to be fair, i did throw it as an AI just to see what it would do; it was a (insert expletives here) disaster.
I was hoping it might help me to shorten the learing curve, by seeing what it did and learning from it; but..... well. I don't speak Greek, or whatever garbage it spat out;I gave it an 80 line script and it's translation spat out 82 errors -  it actually looked a lot like it was trying to code in MQL4, even in instances where I'd seen the mistake and explicitly said "don't do this" it would correct it; then revert it immediately on the next iteration.

Yeah. gonna have to learn it the long way.

And by 'external libraries' i do mean internal ones; I come from a very old school 'IF THEN ELSE' way of coding, more like the old BASIC, than the newer OOP variants. So it's more than one head-trip() at a time for me as an oldboy. I never understood the point in internal libraries; to me they are basically like functions that were never implemented properly and I've never understood why.
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