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GNU Grep and Sed Maintainer Quits: RMS and FSF Harming GNU Project
In a scathing rant posted to a GNU project mailing list, the maintainer of grep and sed announced that he was quitting the GNU project over technical and administrative disagreements. Chief among them: He believes RMS is detrimental to the project by slowing down technical innovation (the example used was RMS's distaste for C++, not exactly a strong point against RMS). Additionally, he noted that the FSF is not doing enough to help GNU "Projects such as gnash are bound to have constant funding problems despite being (and having been for years) in the FSF's list of high priority projects.". Finally: "Attaching the GNU label to one's program has absolutely no
attractiveness anymore. People expect GNU to be as slow as an elephant,
rather than as slick as a gazelle, and perhaps they are right. Projects
such as LLVM achieve a great momentum by building on the slowness of
GNU's decision processes, and companies such as Apple get praise even
if they are only embracing these projects to avoid problems with GPLv3."
The author is quick to note that he has no philosophical disagreements with GNU or the FSF.
From TFA (I know, I know, cardinal sin, but I read the article yesterday on LWN):
However, all Stallman had to offer on the topic was "We
still prefer C to C++, because C++ is so ugly" (sic). As a result of
this, the GNU coding standards have not seen any update in years and
are entirely obsolete.
So, RMS wasn't involved in the C/C++ switch, but his refusal to acknowledge it has lead to a lack of "C++ is a real thing, we should have a coding standard" across GNU.
I saw another comment somewhere (that I can't find now) about how, prior to LLVM, RMS *was* opposing many things (I believe, but can't be sure without the source, that the switch to C++ was one of these things), and since LLVM came out as a competitor, RMS has been compelled to be more amicable to change he doesn't personally like.
I advise people to read the actual message; this summary is exaggerated.
The posting is NOT a "scathing rant", it's a pretty clear, calm and well-reasoned explanation as to issues that the author sees with GNU and GNU software development. There's no flamebait, no ranting, no name-calling.
So RMS doesn't like C++ -- this doesn't stop people who can use it properly from writing their projects in it, does it?
Yeah, after they enforce a company-wide ban on multiple inheritance, exceptions, and 95% of the publicly available libraries.
Ezekiel 23:20
Linus doesn't like C++ because he's a kernel programmer. It's important to him what the CPU actually does, i.e. what machine code gets produced (more or less). RMS may not like C++ because he's from the old generation of programmers who were dealing with all the slow and big machines and for whom object oriented programming may seem just too abstract, too conceptual and far from the machine code... RMS also likes Lisp more than Python, and Lisp is also a very old language.
So RMS doesn't like C++ -- this doesn't stop people who can use it properly from writing their projects in it, does it?
Yeah, after they enforce a company-wide ban on multiple inheritance, exceptions, and 95% of the publicly available libraries.
The Google style only applies to code written by Google employees. Those publicly available libraries are not banned (except for Boost, and then only certain parts of it).
Leffler moved on to FreeBSD afaik, and even was FreeBSD Foundation president for a while
Reading Linux Torvalds on C++ might be instructive:
http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus
So RMS doesn't like C++ -- this doesn't stop people who can use it properly from writing their projects in it, does it?
Yeah, after they enforce a company-wide ban on multiple inheritance, exceptions, and 95% of the publicly available libraries.
Google doesn't ban multiple inheritance, though in most cases multiple inheritance of anything but pure interfaces is discouraged, and there's rarely any need for Google engineers to use all of the BOOST libraries, given Google's extensive internal libraries.
I do wish that exceptions were allowed, but I understand the rationale for avoiding them (it's spelled out in the style guide), and can't disagree with the decision.
(I write C++ code for Google.)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Where is this scathing rant? All I can find is a extremely polite, well written airing of grievance and resignation.