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.'"

Comments

Stroustrup complaining about the quaility of code

[nagora]

is like Hitler lamenting the treatment of Jews.

I've never encountered a more overrated programmer than Stroustrup, nor a worse technical writer. The examples in his books would make any decent programmer cry, and the text would do the same to anyone who likes clear prose. Worthless crap.

Re:Stroustrup is the problem

[asuffield]

Most of the problems with C stem from the "pointer equals array" model, the basic source of buffer overflow bugs.

Most of the reasons for using C also stem from this model. If C/C++ did not exist, we would have to invent (at least one of) them.

People keep using C because nothing else really gets the job done as well. No amount of complaining about this is going to change it. Whoever you are, whatever your ideas are, they are not a viable solution in the real world - the proof of this is that we're still using C for a wide range of tasks. If your idea actually worked, we'd be using that instead. Plenty of people would like to be able to replace C.

Go think of a better idea.