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Bjarne Stroustrup Reveals All On C++
An anonymous reader writes "Bjarne Stroustrup, the creative force behind one of the most widely used and successful programming languages — C++ — is featured in an in-depth 8-page interview where he reveals everything programmers and software engineers should know about C++; its history, what it was intended to do, where it is at now, and of course what all good code-writers should think about when using the language he created."
C++ is a language of a million gotchas. The moment I start having to think about implementation detail and I'm not writing an operating system or compiler, I know I'm using the wrong language.
...it's largely a waste of time. The author spends an inordinate amount of time complaining that C++ prefers compile-time overhead to run-time overhead, and has no understanding that C++ is designed to have no unnecessary performance penalty relative to C. It would be nice if he did, as whatever insights the FQA author has concerning OO languages could be gleaned without wading through a few thousand lines of whining over the lack of things like garbage collection, heap compaction, run time bounds-checking, etc. He also has apparently never heard of Boost.
I'm afraid that web site is one of those things that gets way too much attention in some on-line communities because of its controversial nature.
The reason the two sides are far from equally partisan is that Stroustrup freely admits there is another side to the debate and that C++ has its flaws, and he is making efforts to improve the situation. The FQA, on the other hand, just makes blanket statements like "For example, the lack of garbage collection makes C++ exceptions and operator overloading inherently defective", which simply isn't true (and neither are many of the statements made in the FQA under those particular headings).
If you read the comments the guy who wrote the FQA makes on forums like reddit, as well as throughout the FQA itself, it's pretty obvious that unlike Stroustrup, he has little interest in any balanced discussion on the subject. He's just out to prove the other side wrong — where "wrong" often means "not agreeing with him" — and perhaps, the cynic in me suspects, to make a reputation for himself in the process.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Well, there's no doubt in my mind that C++ is a language design tour de force. The question is whether its design objectives are the right ones.
They were probably the right objectives for the place (Bell Labs) and time (1979) it was conceived.
At the time, computers were inconceivably slow by today's standards. I worked at a small developer that had a very nice AT&T 3B2-400, which had a WE32000 microprocessor, which probably ran at about 10-15MHz; a half dozen programmers shared it.
As for the place, well, it was crawling with C programmers and C libraries, doing rather complex and important systems programming. Compatibility with C and proven C libraries would have been a huge thing.
So, an efficient, object oriented version of C was probably exactly what was needed.
I think that if there was any fault, it was the attempt to meet the goals of efficiency and compatibility with a language that implemented everything that (at the time was thought to be) necessary for programming in an object oriented style. Multiple inheritance carries too much baggage when all you want to do is to guarantee objects have a certain interface. Likewise, I think operator overloading is another example of trying to do too much. Yes, it makes programmer classes "first class citizens", but it really has no demonstrable practical benefit in my opinion. In situations where you need a special purpose language, it's probably better just to create one.
Still, that's hindsight. If you really understand all the things Stroustrup was trying to do, C++ is quite awe inspiring.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yawn.
If you don't like C++, you probably just don't understand it. Yes, it's a complex language. However, if you use RAII (a fundamental tenant of C++) you will not. leak. memory. ever. Same arguments about C++ are used over and over again by people who don't grok the language. Is it the end-all be-all language? No. But it is darn good at what it does (performance minded system level code) with almost none of the problems C has (memory leaks and weak typing).
I Do C++