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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.
the example used was RMS's distaste for C++, not exactly a strong point against RMS
So RMS doesn't like C++ -- this doesn't stop people who can use it properly from writing their projects in it, does it?
Does RMS actually have control over what GNU projects are implemented in? If so, I'd say that's quite a strong point against GNU -- throw the whole "right tool for the job" bit out the window because one dude doesn't like it?
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++?
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.
Except C++ isn't crap.
Pshaw. Well, I guess we can't really blame the Inferiors. Until you mature, I suppose you won't have a lush, fully-grown neckbeard whispering in your ears the dark secrets of why any programming language invented past 1972 is inherently worse. Trust me, everything will make so much more sense once you've heard the beard. Then you'll understand why we ONLY decided to grudgingly tolerate C after we made it more baroque than necessary to ensure our own job security. This entire "easier to write code" fad will certainly pass.
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!
> lol AIX who uses that shit
Employers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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
If C++ were a car, the accelerator would be a pedal located under the passenger seat, a dial on the radio, and a lever in the trunk. Most users would just shift into neutral, which would be a 14 step process, and push their car around the block; they would then point to this as a major accomplish, and would note that once the car is in neutral it is powerful -- after all, you can always shift into drive if you really need to!
Palm trees and 8
The comments below seem no more relevant than this "slightly off topic" thread... I find that unfortunate. Of people who have made the world a better place, I list RMS near the top. He's done so in a selfless manner that makes me proud to be human. Sure, I don't agree with him half the time, but if I could trade my life for one where I could do as much good as he's done, yeah... I'd do it. Have you ever heard of Gandhi? Ever read about that flake? He slept (as in sleeping - not sex) naked with young girls to prove to himself he could control his animal impulses. Yet few argue about what Gandhi did for the world. It kills me to hear about people complaining about RMS's views on C++, on which he happens to be mostly right, and even if you disagree this is not naked girl territory. We should acknowledge the outcome of his life's effort: the world runs on free software. Standing ovation for RMS! Imagine how much harder it would be to write awesome code if we didn't have all this free stuff!
That said, RMS both promotes and harms the goals of the free software movement. As the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" pointed out, RMS brings a central control view to free software that is counter to the whole environment that made GNU/Linux awesome. Debian, IMO, epitomizes this flaw. Rather than helping young new programmer share code and ideas, you have to pray to the Debian Gods and hope they take pity on your pitiful new package before it can be share across the Debian universe. Sure, Debian has it's place... deep in the innards of server racks where 99.9% up time is required, but not on a bright young programmer's desktop. If you want to be part of the new innovative group of coders, go learn about programming for Android.
I hope this message can finally be heard by RMS and those most central to the free software movement: we volunteer programmers are sick and tired of dealing with the wall of red tape you've built. Please get out of the way and let us do our thing. But you're right about C++.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
I guess the big news here to me was that GNU grep and sed were being maintained. :)
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
I worked with a Russian programmer of very few words, who willingly ran AIX as his desktop OS. When asked why, he said "I enjoy the strict confines of AIX."
I had absolutely no idea how to respond to that.