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Interview With Bjarne Stroustrup
koval writes "artima.com has published an initial portion of interview with Bjarne Stroustrup.
The scope of first part is mostly about improving the style of C++ programming and getting maximum from a language."
I find that nearly everyone who criticizes [INSERT LANGUAGE HERE] is either using an ancient implementation ... or they simply haven't explored the language fully.
I C|PHP|Forth|6502 Assembly|Forth) all suck if you're only looking at their flaws, and they all rock if you're only looking at their strengths. If you're not looking at both, you're not getting it.
This is an excellent template for recognizing language bigotry. Try this as a template for recognizing language agnosticism:
"I can enumerate dozens of less-than-perfect features in my favorite language."
Until you understand the weaknesses as well as the strengths of your favorite language, you either haven't explored it fully or you don't know enough languages well enough to have a basis for comparison. (C|C++|Java|Perl|AWK|Python|COBOL|RPG|Fortran|BAS
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing.
The interview is interesting in that it confirms the impression I've had from using and/or struggling to use C++. When I try to do anything object-oriented, specifically anything involving polymorphism, it seems to be fighting me all the way. After some struggling I usually emerge triumphant, but it's almost always a battle.
What Stoustrup seems to be saying is that classes should be treated as a special big deal, and shouldn't be used unless you're sure they're necessary. He seems to be recommending that there be, um, a class of elite programmers who put in the intense work to develop good, usable, well-debugged classes, and that the rank and file should, by all means use those classes but should not aspire to write new ones.
And this is not unreasonable, given the effort of writing classes and getting the storage management right and so forth.
The thing is, it's not a big deal to use classes in a truly object-oriented language. I'm not just talking about Smalltalk. Heck, they're trivial to use in REALbasic.
Well, is that good? It certainly leads to overuse of OOP. To a man with a hammer everything is a nail, and every programming language tends to encourage overuse of the things that it facilitates. Every programming language has a tendency to induce brain-warp.
C++, for better or for worse, does not induce object-oriented brain-warp.
People who try to use OOP in C++ because it's cool or because of some article they read (or some instructor they had) find that C++ punishes such behavior. And Stoustrup is right: when you are programming in C++, OOP should be used sparingly and only when it's needed.
Again, I'm not saying whether that's bad or good. That will depend on the degree to which you think OOP ought to be encouraged. If you think OOP should be just as much a part of a programmer's mental toolbox as iteration, or recursion, then it's not good. If you think OOP was the overhyped IT fad of the nineties, then it's not bad.
What I'm saying is that it has always seemed to me that C++ is not a very object-oriented language, and Stoustrup's remarks seem to me to confirm the objective validity of that observation.
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