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Bjarne Stroustrup On Concepts, C++0x
An anonymous reader writes "Danny Kalev has an interview with Bjarne Stroustrup about the failure of concepts, the technical issues of concepts, whether the ISO committee's days are over, and whether C++ is at a dead-end. 'I don't think that concepts were doomed to fail. Also, I don't think concepts were trying to fix many things or to transform C++ into an almost new language. They were introduced to do one thing: provide direct language support to the by-far dominant use of templates: generic programming. They were intended to allow direct expression of what people already state in comments, in design documents, and in documentation. Every well-designed template is written with a notion of what is required from its arguments. For good code, those requirements are documented (think of the standard's requirements tables). That is, today most templates are designed using an informal notion of concepts.'"
What's really unfortunate is that he's one of the very few language maintainers out there that isn't of the mentality "Rah rah! My language/tool/design-philosophy/whatever is the solution to all your problems and will take over the world tomorrow."
Care to actually provide the names of those other language maintainers, with appropriate citations, that make such claims?
What are those people supposed to say about their language? That it sucks? That user's shouldn't use it? None of those quotes imply anything that you are claiming. Those are just snippets telling people what the positives of using their languages is. In the case of Ruby the maintainer even says that if you are happy with Perl or Python that you shouldn't switch to Ruby. That's hardly a claim of "my language is the solution to all your problems and it's going to take over the world".
What on earth does a GUI have to do with a language? A GUI belongs in the C++ specification about as much as Java belongs in the kernel.
Each has its place and is used when necessary and shouldn't be forced into a place it doesn't belong for convenience.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)