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Bjarne Stroustrup on the Problems With Programming
Hobart writes "MIT's Technology Review has a Q&A with C++ inventor Bjarne Stroustrup. Highlights include Bjarne's answers on the trade-offs involved in the design of C++, and how they apply today, and his thoughts on the solution to the problems. From the interview: 'Software developers have become adept at the difficult art of building reasonably reliable systems out of unreliable parts. The snag is that often we do not know exactly how we did it.'"
...at a university I know, they start teaching you programming in...Visual Basic. I can imagine the effect that has on the poor confused heads here who never eventually grasp other languages (including VB).
Maybe if they started with something like Pascal or something...but thats just not 'modern' or cutting edge nowadays...
I think this is the case in many institutions leading to low quality coders.
The Firefox codebase is indeed a mess. Don't take my word for it, view it yourself: http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/.
Part of the problem is the severe over-architecturing. This over-architecturing has added much unnecessary complexity to the overall design of Gecko and Firefox. Much of it is "justified" in the name of portability. But then we find that other frameworks, including wxWidgets and GTK+, do just fine without the overly complex and confusing architecture of Gecko and Firefox.
It's just not easy for most developers to become up-to-date with the Mozilla codebase because of all this added complexity. Unless a volunteer developer has literally months to spend learning even the small portion of the code they're interested in working on, it's basically inaccessible to most programmers.
The constraints of the real-world often come into play, and we have developers modifying code they don't necessarily understand fully. And so we get the frequent crashes, glitches, memory leaks and security problems that Firefox 1.5.x and 2.x have become famous for.
It's likely that Mozilla should ideally rewrite a vast portion of their code, keeping simplicity in mind. That likely won't happen, and thus we will most assuredly still run into problems with Firefox and Gecko, problems caused directly by the overcomplication of the Mozilla architecture.
Stroustrup developed much of the cfront C++ compiler, which itself was written in C++. It received widespread use on most UNIX platforms, and was the default C++ compiler on systems like HP-UX and SCO UnixWare. Numerous organizations licensed it, and some even offered ports to systems like DOS.
He was the head of AT&T Labs' Large-scale Programming Research department for a number of years. I'd imagine you're not familiar with some of the cutting-edge research he was responsible for when it comes to massive software systems. Had you actually been familiar with his achievements, you wouldn't have accused him of coming up "short in the real world department".
No benchmark is ever going to be a definitive measure, the best they can ever do is give you an idea or the general qualitative differences. I think you'll find, however, if you were to actually try Ada, Eiffel, D, or OCaml for an entire application, that they do, in fact, compare very well with C++ - it's not like there aren't any significant large applications written in those languages (well, possibly not D): they get plenty of use in various industries and are well known for their efficiency.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
There's actually a language called D that is related to C++ and is supposed to fixe a lot of C++'s problems, and annoying syntax. Features.
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.