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Bjarne Stroustrups and More Problems With Programming
Phoe6 writes "As a follow up to the first part of his interview, Technology Review Magazine has another article running titled 'More Trouble with Programming'. Bjarne Stroustrup shares his point of view on good software, bad software design and aspect oriented programming." From the article: "Technology Review: Name the coolest and lamest programs ever written in C++, and say what worked and didn't work. Bjarne Stroustrup: Google! Can you even remember the world before Google? (It was only five years ago, after all.) What I like about Google is its performance under severe resource constraints. It possesses some really neat parallel and distributed algorithms. Also, the first Web browsers. Can you imagine the world without the Web? (It was only about 10 years ago.) Other programs that I find cool are examples of embedded-systems code: the scene-analysis and autonomous driving systems of the Mars Rovers, a fuel-injection control for a huge marine engine. There is also some really cool code in Photoshop's image processing and user interfaces."
Why try to imagine it, can't we just remember it?
Programming, yes, but computer science doesn't use C++.
Bull. At least sort of.
First, it depends in part on what your definition of computer science is. Most CS courses are taught in a C-like languages. At my undergrad institution, most of my programming assignments were done with C++. Sure, there was exposure to ML, but my impression is that most places that's mostly confined to the PL classes. (There are some notible exceptions that use ML or Scheme for intro courses.) Even at those institutions, I expect that later classes have assignments in a C-like language.
Second, there's a lot of CS that relates to C++. Compiler theory of how you implement things about it, and language design. It's not about C++ specifically, but it certainly relates.
Third, there is a fair bit of work in PL that directly relates. Not all PL is people in ivory towers coding in ML and Lisp. CCured is a very nice bit of work, though it's only C because it's built on top of the C Intermediate Language (CIL). There's early work now to create a CIL++, and I'm sure that it hasn't escaped anyone there about the potential to extend CCured to C++ once that's done. The parser for CIL++ will be something called Elsa, which was a major part of the research of one of the people there. My own research is indirectly related even. I'm looking at static analysis of binary code. Earlier work done in my group was explicitly directed to being able to find vtable pointers that C++ compilers produce.
You're right to the extent that the core of CS is really in some sense applied math, and is entirely language-neutral. However, to say that C++ has no relation to CS because it's just programming (which CS isn't about) is just wrong.
Since always ... Getting a 10% performance gain in a 500,000 servers data center could mean a cost saving of 50,000 servers. On 5 servers you wouldn't bother because you wouldn't save anything. The resources we are talking about here are in essence entirely economical and pragmatical. Adding 50,000 servers is not easily done nor particularly cheap.
Look a monkey!