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."

Comments

If C/C++ is too complex...

[MacGyver2210]

...perhaps he should find another line of work. Quite frankly, I love C++, and Java to a lesser degree. C and its big brother C++ are great languages to learn. They teach you more about how the computer uses the code you're writing than something like CodeBlocks where you just fit them together in the right order. Good luck debugging software at a real-world company if you don't like C.

As for Java, I think it's a pretty inefficient language, but so is C# and .NET applications in general. Any managed code has overhead.

If you hate Java so much, why did you base your phone OS around it?

I could see if he was railing against Assembly or Fortran or something, but then even still many people love Assembly too. My Machine Architecture teacher was a fiend for it, and once I learned how it really worked it wasn't that bad for me either. I, for one, am proud to say that I could manually write machine code (if I really had to) though I have no plans to do so. I think every true computer programmer should BE ABLE to do so, whether or not they ever do. That would, in my eyes, make a programmer worth their salt.