Scott Meyers Retires From Involvement With C++ (blogspot.com)

An anonymous reader writes: If you've studied C++ any time in the past 25 years, you've probably read something by Scott Meyers. He wrote Effective C++, regarded by many as one of the top two books for learning to work with the language. He also wrote similar books about changes in C++11 and C++14, as well as making good use of the Standard Template Library. He's been a seemingly endless source of instructional videos, articles, and helpful answers on Usenet and StackOverflow. Unfortunately for us, Meyers has now decided to move on. "25 years after publication of my first academic papers involving C++, I'm retiring from active involvement with the language. It's a good time for it. My job is explaining C++ and how to use it, but the C++ explanation biz is bustling. ... My voice is dropping out, but a great chorus will continue." Thanks for all the help, Scott.

Comments

Thank you.

[c]

Twenty years ago, Effective C++ was the book which convinced me that C++ was so full of land mines and other hidden traps that I needed to walk away from it and never, ever touch that pile of crap again.

Okay, I lied. It didn't take the entire book; I got the hint after the first five chapters.

Re:Thank you.

[erapert]

1. So what do you use instead?
2. Did you know C++ has moved on quite a bit in the past twenty years?

Re:Thank you.

[PolygamousRanchKid]

C++ was so full of land mines and other hidden traps

I wouldn't say that "C++ was is full of land mines and other hidden traps". However, C++ enables you to bury your own land mines, and build your own hidden traps. Effective C++ taught me what stuff I need to avoid.

In fact, a project manager tasked me with creating some programming standards for our C++ project . . . a job that nobody wanted to do. This was because all the programmers were very good, but used to programming alone, and doing things their own way. There was guaranteed to be blood, devastation, death, war and horror in this discussion. So I created a presentation based on Effective C++. When we went through all the items, there was dissension indeed, but when I fell back, and we went through the wisdom of Meyers' text, we found grudgingly agreement.

To summarize, C++ is a very powerful language you can unwittingly write your own H-bomb with it. So it is great to have someone like Meyers to help you from nuking yourself.

Re:Thank you.

[Greyfox]

It was pretty shit the first couple of times I looked at it in the early 90's. IIRC the first time I looked at it, the language didn't even have templates yet. I also vaguely recall the discussion about templates and thinking that it was a cool idea. The early C++ libraries were basically written in C, using most pointers and with plenty of difficulty determining who owned what resources at what times. At the time no one really knew how to do object oriented design, either. The whole design patterns discussion and RAII really started cleaning things up a few years later. Boost provides pretty good coverage of the gaps in the standard language library, though the standards committee seems to have pretty much addressed that by pulling a good chunk of boost into the standard.

I used the language for a test data generation project a couple years ago and was quite impressed with how nice it was to work with -- easily as easy as writing a java program. I needed a math library to generate the data and considered several languages. The Eigen C++ library I found looked like it had the easiest API to get into, with reasonably clear documentation and examples. I was able to organize the functionality of the program into unit-tested libraries. Between that and the strict type checking in the compile phase, I was able to deploy with very high confidence that I wouldn't be introducing any bugs into the environment.

Re:Thank you.

[c]

They weren't end of the world scenarios and you wouldn't even really touch them unless you were in the business of writing highly portable generic libraries.

... which is the sort of thing I was doing at the time.

Granted, at the time we were also using a mid-90's vintage of Visual C++ and trying to port to things like g++ on Linux, BeOS, MacOS, etc, so much of the issues we had were less due to "C++ the language" and more because of "C++ the implementation(s)", but Meyers' book was the icing on an increasingly unpalatable cake.

Re:Thank you.

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

Right. Like C and Perl don't have more landmines.

Re:Thank you.

[swillden]

Right. Like C and Perl don't have more landmines.

I like C++, and consider it my preferred language for most work, but it clearly has more landmines than any other major language. It's not hard to avoid them, but you do have to know where they are.

Another shameless profit-monger...

[andrewa]

Scott was one of the many greedy people to profit from Stroustrup's clever industry cons! Read this revealing leaked interview (Invention of C++) from 1998 and learn the truth!

Sarcasm mode off...
Thanks Scott! You will be missed!

Free

[The Evil Atheist]

Basically there's a lot of free talks on Youtube these days that give better advice for people who actually write code. Scott Meyers is great and all, but he admits that he doesn't actually write code. These days I look to people like Alex Stepanov and Sean Parent. I think Sean Parent's talk on rotate and partition alone is a more effective way to think about C++ than that whole business about OO.

Re:Free

[dcollins117]

Posting the link to Parent's talk so the truly interested don't have to search for it (like I did). Hopefully this is the one you were talking about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH6sSOr-yk8