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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."
Interviewer: Well, it's been a few years since you changed the world of software design, how does it feel, looking back?
Stroustrup: Actually, I was thinking about those days, just before you arrived. Do you remember? Everyone was writing 'C' and, the trouble was, they were pretty damn good at it. Universities got pretty good at teaching it, too. They were turning out competent - I stress the word 'competent' - graduates at a phenomenal rate. That's what caused the problem.
Interviewer: problem?
Stroustrup: Yes, problem. Remember when everyone wrote Cobol?
Interviewer: Of course, I did too
Stroustrup: Well, in the beginning, these guys were like demi-gods. Their salaries were high, and they were treated like royalty.
Interviewer: Those were the days, eh?
Stroustrup: Right. So what happened? IBM got sick of it, and invested millions in training programmers, till they were a dime a dozen.
Interviewer: That's why I got out. Salaries dropped within a year, to the point where being a journalist actually paid better.
Stroustrup: Exactly. Well, the same happened with 'C' programmers.
Interviewer: I see, but what's the point?
Stroustrup: Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little. I thought 'I wonder what would happen, if there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with programmers? Actually, I got some of the ideas from X10, you know, X windows. That was such a bitch of a graphics system, that it only just ran on those Sun 3/60 things. They had all the ingredients for what I wanted. A really ridiculously complex syntax, obscure functions, and pseudo-OO structure. Even now, nobody writes raw X-windows code. Motif is the only way to go if you want to retain your sanity.
[NJW Comment: That explains everything. Most of my thesis work was in raw X-windows. :)]
Interviewer: You're kidding...?
Stroustrup: Not a bit of it. In fact, there was another problem. Unix was written in 'C', which meant that any 'C' programmer could very easily become a systems programmer. Remember what a mainframe systems programmer used to earn?
Interviewer: You bet I do, that's what I used to do.
Stroustrup: OK, so this new language had to divorce itself from Unix, by hiding all the system calls that bound the two together so nicely. This would enable guys who only knew about DOS to earn a decent living too.
Interviewer: I don't believe you said that...
Stroustrup: Well, it's been long enough, now, and I believe most people have figured out for themselves that C++ is a waste of time but, I must say, it's taken them a lot longer than I thought it would.
Interviewer: So how exactly did you do it?
Stroustrup: It was only supposed to be a joke, I never thought people would take the book seriously. Anyone with half a brain can see that object-oriented programming is counter-intuitive, illogical and inefficient.
Interviewer: What?
Stroustrup: And as for 're-useable code' - when did you ever hear of a company re-using its code?
Interviewer: Well, never, actually, but...
Stroustrup: There you are then. Mind you, a few tried, in the early days. There was this Oregon company - Mentor Graphics, I think they were called - really caught a cold trying to rewrite everything in C++ in about '90 or '91. I felt sorry for them really, but I thought people would learn from their mistakes.
Interviewer: Obviously, they didn't?
Stroustrup:
Let me guess... you work as a prior art researcher for the USPTO.
sigs are a waste of space
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.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!