Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
With a little research, nothing could beat MS-Access with its VB. We quickly had working GUIs integrated with business logic. Things were beautiful. PHP was available but the its abilities at the time were very limited.
Sadly, there is still no real answer to MS-Access' programming paradigm in the Linux world. Gambas http://gambas.sourceforge.net/ comes close. So does RealBasic http://www.realbasic.com/. Other wannabe environments are simply wasting time at present, and do not appear to be serious.
I am meant to understand that Kross http://conference2006.kde.org/conference/talks/2.p hp is progressing well, but was not impressed when I tried it.
Having powerful programming environments that are friendly to newbies is OK, but making them actively hostile to power users on the other hand is insane. Those two items aren't mutually exclusive, but Linux programmers tend to think so - sadly.
The good thing about working in software-centric companies (besides understanding the programmer psyche) is that they often don't balk as much at being told something can't be done in a timeframe. Blizzard doesn't blink an eye when it has to delay a game by a year (probably more like 2 or 3 years when compared to internal, non-public set dates). Microsoft finally decided to nuke WinFS once they finally conceded that you're not going to get it within this decade, no matter how much they throw chairs. Google apparently has almost no schedules.
Some say C++ didn't go far enough, in that you can't define arbitary operators. As such, you have a small limited number to choose from and therefore overloading is all you can do. I'd love to be able to define an operator like .= to do string concatenation, but I can't, so I use += and live with the confusion and possible errors that causes.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Anyway, the typical unsophsticated (software development-wise) customer can't tell the difference between the two. This is made worse when many managers who were supposedly professional programmers themselves can't tell the difference. As far as I can tell, the only way for a programmer to deal with this is to simply BE great and be ready to move on if the customer can't see that greatness. Eventually they'll get somewhere that will appreciate it.
I also cover some of this in another reply.
Actually, they do plan a major revamp of the Mozilla base. So major that they're going to use a tool to help automate the process.
If I had mod points, I'd gladly give them all to you ; I'm not a programmer by education, but I've always programmed tools since I have a computer. Basic could be abused in the past (in fact it was more or less a requirement with MS-BASIC on 8 bits computers - 48 Kb RAM !) but since OOP has become widespread, you just can't beat that language for day to day scripting, SQL access etc. Even in the mid 80s, if you were lucky enough to have a better PC than the average plastic toy, you could go with Basic-E or CBasic, which were by many aspects precursors to Java.
The sad truth is today's Basics (VB, Gambas...) have an unfounded bad reputation ; you can't really abuse them anymore, and with a bit of care, they make a very good entry point in the programming realm for everybody. And if Linux is to become relevant on the desktop, it needs power users to be able to switch the enormous base of custom applications made in VB for every business out there on Linux. The VB6 converter in Gambas might become soon the killer app of Linux, in that respect, combined with superior DB access and tight KDE integration (yes, you can use DCOP in Gambas).
To me, Gambas, being free software, fills the same spot MBasic was fulfilling on Amstrad CPC or Commodore 64. It gives control to the user, and that is priceless. Since my 8 bits days, I've learned bits of x86 ASM, Clipper, C, C++, perl, and liked the extra power it gave me ; but I've indulged in Gambas for a couple of months, and realisticaly, it's the only way to create a cool looking, desktop integrated application on spare time in a pinch. If I were again the teen I was, I'd like to begin programming with it because it would be the quickest rewarding experience in programming. You get to love programming cool things you can show to the world before you actually begin to like programming correctly for the sake of it.
The languages students need to study are :
Prolog
Miranda/SML/Haskell
Java/C++/C#/Smalltalk/any other imperative with OO
Because these show the different choices in representation that programmers essentially have : declarative, functional, imperative (scripts). OO is a useful concept to describe to students because it gets them used to the ideas of abstraction and forces good programming practice like information hiding.
Later on it would be good if Universities taught web development (Php for example) and database development (SQL, possibly microsoft tools).
Interestingly universities do not teach, and I think rightly, the most common activity that CS grads end up doing in the real world, which is installation, integration, customisation and configuration of COTS products like CRM systems.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
Hmm...
:) Not sure where you'd want to throw in a scripting language; or if it's even really neccessary... what skill do you learn from learning a scripting language other than the language itself?
I'd say pascal first as an introductory programming course, then C, then some assembly, then finally C++ or Java.
It's a lot easier to learn sequential programming when you're not busy shooting yourself in the foot... let them hit C after they know what a conditional and a loop are
Maybe in usage, but that doesn't lend itself well to learning. Learning, by definition, is the process of reinventing the wheel so that you understand how the wheel works. They don't teach algebra by presenting the quadratic formula and saying, "Here, use this when solving a polynomial of degree 2" - they lead you every step of the way through the development of the quadratic formula so that you know how it works and why it works. Likewise, programmers learning to program should be writing quicksort implementations rather than ignoring the details because "it's already implemented in a library".
Of course, once you've graduated and are a professional writing a program for somebody else to use, you should reuse what's available as much as possible.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
I'm curious why you think multiple inheritence in C++ is more trouble than it's worth.
As far as operator overloading is concerned, the intent was to provide the conceptual parallelism you explained. In D&E, he talks about C++ users asking for the capability for things like matrix addition. Using << and >> for stream input and output was an afterthought. Further, I don't think it was leveraging the C compiler that precluded him from overloading operators other than what were already in C. He easily could have supported new operators, as Cfront was not just a preprocessor, it was a full compiler that happened to compile down to C. Since I've never read anywhere (either in interviews, D&E, or TC++PL) why he chose to not allow arbitrary operators, I assume it was because he didn't feel they were necessary. I know that D&E has discussion of an exponent operator, which was eventually ruled out.
Because nearly always composition is a better way to deal with the design problems multiple inheritance attempts to solve, especially as the situation becomes more and more complex. Also, inheritance often implies more than necessary -- multiple inheritance multiply so. You usually are most concerned with guaranteeing an object's behavior when you use inheritance, but you also get an implementation whether you want it or not. This creates unnecessary complexity and problems when you use multiple inheritance simply to ensure that object class memebers provide certain services.
I'm not saying it's never useful of course. But it is never necessary and often a bad thing.
You make some good points. My guess is this: allowing user created operators probably made lexxing difficult or impossible. You wouldn't be able to tell whether a sequence of characters was an operator or something else until you had parsed the operator's definition. You couldn't have a fixed grammar either, which might preclude further parsing even if you had a clever way of guessing that some string is probably an operator.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.