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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."
It is,
int main()
{
cout "Hello World" eol;
return 0;
}
Very cool at first, then it just goes down from there.
Please... he's one of the most influential people in the field of computer science today, at least spell his name right.
Why try to imagine it, can't we just remember it?
Googlebot is mainly written in Python. Google is mainly written in C/C++.
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
WorldWideWeb, being on a NeXT box, was written in Objective-C, not C++.
FTFA: I hope you didn't put too much money on it! I don't see aspect-oriented programming escaping the "academic ghetto" any day soon, and if it does, it will be less pervasive than OO. When it works, aspect-oriented programming is elegant, but it's not clear how many applications significantly benefit from its use.
Totally agreed. AOP is a strange form of "dynamic" insertion of code at special "cut points" of execution within the code and represent a very very lazy way to avoid good OOP structure of your applications.
In a bigger framework AOP can be totally unpredictable and wreck otherwise locked and working code.
When AOP started to pick some speed in the beginning I was naturally both interested and slightly annoyed that so short after OOP here's yet another concept for programming I have to learn and implement in my software.
Not so fast though, since as much as OOP provides useful abstractions that makes your code more readable and predictable, AOP does exactly the opposite except in few very limited cases.
The cons outweigh the pros.
Javac is the coolest program written in C++ :-)
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Claiming Google as a cool C++ program is about 1/3 true. Most Google code is written in C++, Java, and Python: C++ for performance-critical stuff, Python for scripting, and Java for everything in between. The trend is definitely toward Java at the expense of the other two.
Also, for what it's worth, Google's use of Aspect-oriented programming is ramping up pretty fast.
Ooh, but your analogy can extend! Sure, I can go down to Home Depot and buy some interior paint to spruce up my living room, or some 2x4s to build a new deck, or something like that. But have you ever heard of building inspections? Anytime you do serious work, like an addition or a new building or even heavy electrical, you're probably going to have to get permits, submit plans, and then have a licensed building inspector come out and check your work. And it if ain't done to code, you're going to have to rip it all out and hire somebody who know what they're doing.
The reason behind all this bureacratic, intrusive government oversight is that building codes are written in blood. Code specs have emerged over time because people died when buildings collapsed, or bad electrical wiring caused fires. The lesson is that if you're not doing something that could cause injury or death, go ahead and do it yourself. If not, you'd either better learn the right way to do it or hire somebody.
Code divides into similar categories, although I the decision point is different: Is the failure of this application tolerable? It may be a question of lives at risk (avionics, air traffic control, miliary systems, automotives braking/control, medical) or it might just be economic (my business stops and I lose money when our servers bug out). It's only prudent to analyze your situation and come to a rational decision about whether you want to tolerate the risks of hiring professionals (or learning professional methods and implementing them yourself), versus playing pickup ball.
Having lived through a couple of start-ups, both successful and unsuccessful, I can tell you that the different approaches do make a difference. I think that's what Bjarne is getting at: if the application matters, you'd better do it right.
What I usually say when interview candidates ask about this is that back-end and data crunching code tends to be C++, web GUI front-end stuff tends to be Java and Javascript, and scripts tend to be Python. Whatever tool works best for the job. It's not much different from what I've seen at other jobs, except for using Python instead of something like Perl. But there are no hard and fast rules. For example, there was a slashdot article last week about an internal web app written in Python. Here's an older article that talks a bit about Google's philosophy for choosing tools. There are various articles on Google technologies floating around on the web site too. Before anyone asks, I have no idea what the relative size of the code base in each language is.
Disclaimer: I work for Google.
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!
Um. Yeah. Er.
"WorldWideWeb was written in Objective-C."
No Google bot is written in C++. html
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/active/html/googlebot
When you need high performance, C++ is better choice than any other language. Google(or Yahoo) wont have a single language framework to run its platform. Always it will be combination of languages. Whatever have I read so far Google's core search engine is in C++ and several C++ libraries are available as python modules. Standalone products may be written in specific languages. Gmail and Google Calender are written in Java.