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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.
I knew about Linus Torvalds's distaste of C++, but not Richard Stallman's. What is it with open-source leaders and their irrational hate of C++?
When using RAII sensibly, C++ does offer excellent support for babysitting your memory usage. In fact, it offers superb support for managing any sort of a resource that needs to be allocated and later deallocated. There is no good equivalent in C.
These days, C++'s modern smart pointer classes make memory management a complete non-issue. You get very predictable and effortless freeing of memory, all without having the performance of your app destroyed by garbage collection like you do when using a language like Java, C# or Ruby.
This is just the power of C++ in action. It lets you easily build minimal-cost abstractions upon C.
That's why all of the leading DBMS's and most Triple-A video games are primarily written in C++, as well as the guts of Google's search engine, Amazon's order and fulfillment system, Microsoft Office and Exchange server, etc.
Because these people don't realize that C++ sucks that's why!
That isn't quite what he said.
He said that GNU isn't attractive because the leadership isn't effective. It takes too long to make decisions. Sounds to me like "analysis paralysis", or at least typical management where people are too busy playing politics instead of trying to create something awesome.
Love sees no species.
No, that would be Thompson and Ritchie. Stallman's neckbeard has spread horizontally to try and compete, but it's still no match for the epic reach into the neck Thompson's has in that shot.
It is not hard to find examples of why C++ is bad. C++ is statically typed, but fails to deliver the sort of type system power that ML gives programmers. C++ is object oriented, but provides no metaobject protocol and forces programmers to resort to its clumsy templates system to do things that are not hard in languages with MOPs. C++ programmers are expected to figure out whether or not they should use a shared_ptr, weak_ptr, or unique_ptr, or if they should just give up on smart pointers and try to manage memory deallocation on their own (and, of course, there is no garbage collector, not even an optional one). The fact that "move semantics" and "r-value references" are considered to be highlights of C++11 speaks volumes about C++.
For me, the major issues in C++ are not even the lack of features, although most people start there; I point to the difficulty with writing reliable code in C++ as the most important problem. C++ exceptions are only useful in cases where there is no possible way to recover from an error. There are situations in C++ where exceptions are the only way to signal an error; thus there are situations in C++ where recoverable errors become unrecoverable for no reason other than deficiencies in the language. Worse still, the very situations where exceptions are the only way to signal an error also happen to be the situations where throwing an exception is dangerous: constructors and destructors. Beyond handling errors, there is the lengthy list of undefined behavior in C++, much of which could have been defined without any ill effects. The C++ standard even fails to rule out programs that could not possibly make any sense; for example, having a non-void function without any return statements (yes, most compilers will warn you about that -- but warnings are not part of the standard, and if most compilers can detect this there is really no excuse for the standard not explicitly forbidding it).
It is not hard to understand why "C++ is horrible" has become the go-to response to any comment about C++. It is a horrible language, and it is likely a culprit in the billions of dollars wasted on software bugs each year (buffer overflows, dangling pointers, etc.). It is a horrible language because it is inflexible, it lacks expressive power, and it makes things that are simple in other high-level languages needlessly difficult (how do you give the user a macro system that allows them to extend any feature of your program in C++? In some languages, that is as simple as giving the user access to a REPL, from which they can override or extend any behavior.). We are, unfortunately, stuck with this language, and will likely be stuck with it for a while (though I am hopeful that the need for reliable healthcare software will ultimately kill C++, MUMPS, and other awful languages).
Palm trees and 8