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Google Engineer Decries Complexity of Java, C++
snydeq writes "Google distinguished engineer Rob Pike ripped the use of Java and C++ during his keynote at OSCON, saying that these 'industrial programming languages' are way too complex and not adequately suited for today's computing environments. 'I think these languages are too hard to use, too subtle, too intricate. They're far too verbose and their subtlety, intricacy and verbosity seem to be increasing over time. They're oversold, and used far too broadly,' Pike said. 'How do we have stuff like this [get to be] the standard way of computing that is taught in schools and is used in industry? [This sort of programming] is very bureaucratic. Every step must be justified to the compiler.' Pike also spoke out against the performance of interpreted languages and dynamic typing."
Slashdot previously interviewed Rob Pike.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Go has the same problems. They try to make it 'simpler' but along the way they actually make it more complex.
For example, try-catch-finally idiom is an easy and standard way to deal with exceptions. But no, they had to invent their own half-assed implementation just to be 'minimal'.
Also, they insist on using fucking _return_ _codes_ to indicate errors. WTF? It only makes code more complex because of tons of stupid 'if error' statements.
Personally, I like Rust's ( http://wiki.github.com/graydon/rust/project-faq ) design more. At least, it has some new features.
You could at least mention that Rob Pike had a large part in designing Plan 9, a programming language called Limbo, and oh, UTF-8, and that by "he and other Google engineers", TFA means Ken Thompson, who created B (a predecessor to C) and had a part in creating an operating system called Unix.
These two people are the closest thing to a "computer scientist" there probably is, and I'd wager they know quite a lot about programming language design. Pike is known about his feelings towards programming languages like C++.
Rob Pike made a talk about Go and programming language design and makes some interesting points. It's available on youtube.
The summary makes him sound like a winer with no solution. If you read TFA, you see he's pimping Google's new language, Go. That's perfectly understandable since they pay him; but TFA also points out that languages accumulate cruft over time, and Go is a baby.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Should have RTFA I guess, I now realize Mr Pike just talks in circles and really didn't have anything of value to say other than 'programming is hard'.
No, he doesn't. TFA-writer Joab Jackson talks in circles and doesn't have anything of value to say. Mr. Pike, on the other hand, appears to be saying that Google Go fixes a lot of unnecessary complexity in Java and C++.
His keynote isn't linked from either the Slashdot summary or TFA, but can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kj5ApnhPAE
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You seem confused. He said C++ is complex, not C, and he is entirely right. Also, if you used to do Perl, you might like Ruby. It's no faster than Python, but I find it nicer.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
I'm aware of who he is, what he does now and what he's done in the past. I've now seen his keynote.
My opinion hasn't changed. He has nothing to say and talks himself in circles, I'm guess you just don't see it due to lack of understanding, of course maybe I'm the one that doesn't understand.
Who knows, but I'm going to stick with my original assessment that he's just a blow hard spewing about his latest creation and how everyone elses sucks because his creation some how mysteriously fixes the problem that no one else has.
You go listen to what he has to say, I'll continue getting things done while you go play with a new language because its 'better' until you realize that its exactly the same as all the others.
When you start telling me that the language is the problem I realize instantly that you aren't that great of a programmer. My one exception to this is Visual Basic (not BASIC, VB specifically). It is a shitty environment because of the shit support library MS made for it.
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I think you'd be amazed at how much some of the world's companies rely on Excel macros.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Objective-C is definitely simpler than C++. A little complexity is creeping in now, especially with Blocks. But overall it adds very little to C.
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umm... did you miss the part where the guy also bitched that interpreted languages are "too slow"?
so which is it? where on this stone are you going to squeeze the blood from? it's a tradeoff and the menu of available programming language choices is already comprehensive. this guy expresses it better and more comprehensively than i care to in a /. comment:
http://eatthedots.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-is-c-faster-than-python.html
and compiler research has only yielded 4% annual improvement in performance per Proebsting's law
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/toddpro/papers/law.htm
http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2006/cmsc430/lec18.4p.pdf
and compiler researchers concede that a competent human will outperform a compiler for the foreseeable future. so your statement about compilers is total hand-waving away of facts inconvenient to your argument.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I must say I rarely find a comment on /. that I agree as much as I do with yours.
C and Python march hand in hand, one is for machine performance, the other is for programmer performance. If someone thinks C is too complex or too hard to learn then he shouldn't be working with programming computers, he's likely to cause great damage sooner or later.
However, there's one point where C will need a new approach: multiprocessing is coming. Since it seems like Moore's law has hit the ceiling at 3 GHz CPU speeds, all progress in performance for the foreseeable future will come from increasing the number of CPUs and cores working together.
I have done a lot of programming in multithreads using the pthread library lately and I feel that something better is needed, pthread is not close enough to the metal. I think some new fundamental elements may be needed in the language.
C is so great for programming because it mirrors the hardware closely. For instance, pointers work so well because they represent memory addresses. Before I learned C I had worked with Fortran, I still have some programs I wrote over 25 years ago. Today I look at those old Fortran programs and I wonder why I did some things the way I did. I see some convoluted loops and wonder why I did that because, with a quarter century hindsight on using pointers, I create almost instinctively the most efficient set of pointers to handle a data structure.
What programmers often don't realize is that the correct data structure may get orders of magnitude improvement in performance. To give one example, years ago, when I studied artificial neural networks, I read an article in the Doctor Dobb's magazine (January 1989, page 32, "Neural Networks and Noise Filtering" by Casey Klimasaukas). It was a good article, but the source code in C that came with it sucked. There was a struct _pe representing a processing element and each struct _pe had an array of struct _conn representing the connections to that element.
The problem is that in an artificial neural network what each neuron is doing is, basically, a convolution of two arrays. To do that efficiently in hardware you need to have the array elements contiguous in memory. When you put the connection weight in a structure together with other data you will not have that value contiguous with the weights of the other connections.
From an "object oriented" point of view that program was perfect. But if you want to use your multi-core CPU with that, the program sucks. That's the benefit you can get from programming in C that you won't get with other languages.
And don't tell me that raw performance does not matter because you can always get faster hardware. CPU clock speed has stopped at 3 GHz, we must learn to use our multicores if we want to evolve from now on.
"WriteLine()" makes perfect sense in the context of the Console class when paired with its newline-less counterpart, Write(), and is spelled wr[down-arrow][enter]. Four keys. Intellisense (or whatever its equivalent in your preferred IDE is). Use it. Quit inflicting functions like "wrtln" on the rest of us.
You know, nothing pisses me off more than people responding to a post saying only "THIS". Please, keep it to yourself if that's all you can contribute. I feel bad for thewasted bandwidth and computing power that was exhausted on that little brain fart of a post.
The words are short and simple, you don't have to worry about silly things like word gender, etc.
Yeah, you only have to worry about other silly things, such as learning seemingly endless tables of non-standard plural and past tense forms by rote, or understanding just what the hell perfect tense is about.
English is certainly not the hardest language out there, but it's also not the easiest one, by far.