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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.'"
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.
My university started everyone out on C. Having seen some of the horrible code that some students produced even in the final year, I'd say that the problem lies deeper than the language they started out on.
Though I'd hate to have started with Visual Basic all the same.
I've worked in project that was/is probably the most largets VB project in the world. It started in 93 and I don't think they are going to end it soon. I personally hate VB, it's not-so-strongly-typed variables, funny rounding rules and so on, but I wouldn't say that all you can do with it is crap!
The software we were making just works. It has worked for 13 years and keeps working. Maybe it could be little faster if written with some other language and tools or it might have more fancy UI blaablaablaa but it doesn't need those. And rewriting those hundreds of thousands lines of code... Let's just say that I wouldn't like to be in that team.
You don't know what you don't know.