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Bjarne Stroustrup Reflects On 25 Years of C++
eldavojohn writes "Today roughly marks C++'s first release 25 years ago when about six years of Bjarne Stroustrop's life came to fruition in the now pervasive replacement language for C. It achieved ISO standardization in 1998 and its creator regularly receives accolades. Wired's short interview contains some nice anecdotes including 'If I had thought of it and had some marketing sense every computer and just about any gadget would have had a little 'C++ Inside' sticker on it' and 'I'll just note that I consider the idea of one language, one programming tool, as the one and only best tool for everyone and for every problem infantile. If someone claims to have the perfect language he is either a fool or a salesman or both.' There's some surprising revelations in here, too, as his portable computer runs Windows."
I've been writing C++ for 20 of those years and produced an awful lot of performance critical systems code in that time. To this day I find it the most liberating language, whatever is in your mind, you can express it, without the language compromising your intent. I can't see myself moving on until D becomes mainstream, and that may not be before I retire in ten years. I check out all the pretenders as they come and go, nothing else comes close.
C++ FQA (frequently questioned answers)
(Defective C++ is a summary)
'There are only two things wrong with C++: The initial concept and the implementation' - and other quotes
Why C++ sucks
And, previsibly: http://cplusplussucks.com/
If you're new to programming, start with line-number Basic. When you start inventing weird workarounds for the weaknesses of that language - namely, the lack of stack - graduate to C and the world of Block Programming. When that starts seeming small to you, graduate to C++/Java.
The thing is, each and every programming paradigm has been invented to solve problems. You can't really understand it if you don't understand the problem(s) it was invented to solve, and those problems are really only apparent once you push the language to its limits and try make up your own ways to escape them.
And hey, who knows, maybe you'll invent something better.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I think the thing that puts a lot of people off ObjectiveC when they come across it the first time is unfamiliar syntax for calling a method. Ironically this is one of it's greatest strengths! In objectiveC function polymophism is not determined a 'signature' created by the argument "types" (which is an idiotic way to do it since it's ambiguous), but rather by the argument labels. That is, the objectiveC method labels every argument with a variable name, not it's type. For example consider the cosine() function. ObjectiveC lets you effectively says Cosine(Radians=3.14159) and Cosine(Degrees=180.0) and have those be polymorphic even though both arguments are floats. In C++ if you want to do that you'd have to create a different typedef for every argument. yuck.
Moreover, ObjectiveC does not actually determine which method gets called at compile time. it can do it at load time with late binding (like Java) or it can do it at runtime! this is because the object that get's the message can introspect the calling args and decide how to respond to it. You get all these Java-like advantages but run a C-like speed. Nifty.
This is not to say that ObjectiveC is untyped like python keyword args, but rather that you have the benefit of typing and labeling due to it's more versatile syntax. It's just looks funny the first time you see it.
At this point someone always says you can do that in C++ to and then produces some archane C++ way of doing that. Yes, well you can do that in BrainFuck too since it's turing complete as well. What matters is how simple you can make that. The beauty of ObjectiveC is that it is a very very thin layer on C that gets you all the things you really wanted in an object oriented language without the crap that makes it hard to use and debug.