Slashdot Mirror
Is C++ a 'Really Terrible Language'? (gamesindustry.biz)
Long-time Slashdot reader slack_justyb writes, "Jonathan Blow, an independent video game developer, indicated to gamesindustry.biz that while working on a recent project he stopped and considered how miserable programming can be. After some reflection Blow came to the realization as to why. [C++ is a] 'really terrible, terrible language.'"
The main flaw with C++, in Blow's opinion, is that it's a fiendishly complex and layered ecosystem that has becoming increasingly convoluted in its effort to solve different problems; the more layers, the higher the stack, the more wobbly it becomes, and the harder it is to understand.
"Blow is the developer of two games so far -- Braid and The Witness -- and developed a new programming language known as Jai in hopes to help C++ game developers become more productive."
With Jai, Blow hopes to achieve three things: improve the quality of life for the programmer because "we shouldn't be miserable like many of us are"; simplify the systems; and increase expressive power by allowing programmers to build a large amount of functionality with a small amount of code.
Long-time Slashdot reader xx_chris calls C++ "the triumph of syntax over clarity," while in the interview Blow calls C++ 'a weird mess.' But the original submission ends with these questions. "Is Blow correct? Has C++ become a horrific mess that we should ultimately relegate to the bins of COBOL and Pascal? Are there redeeming qualities of C++ that justify the tangle it has become?
"And is Jai a solution or just yet another programming language?"
The main flaw with C++, in Blow's opinion, is that it's a fiendishly complex and layered ecosystem that has becoming increasingly convoluted in its effort to solve different problems; the more layers, the higher the stack, the more wobbly it becomes, and the harder it is to understand.
"Blow is the developer of two games so far -- Braid and The Witness -- and developed a new programming language known as Jai in hopes to help C++ game developers become more productive."
With Jai, Blow hopes to achieve three things: improve the quality of life for the programmer because "we shouldn't be miserable like many of us are"; simplify the systems; and increase expressive power by allowing programmers to build a large amount of functionality with a small amount of code.
Long-time Slashdot reader xx_chris calls C++ "the triumph of syntax over clarity," while in the interview Blow calls C++ 'a weird mess.' But the original submission ends with these questions. "Is Blow correct? Has C++ become a horrific mess that we should ultimately relegate to the bins of COBOL and Pascal? Are there redeeming qualities of C++ that justify the tangle it has become?
"And is Jai a solution or just yet another programming language?"
Even Stroustrup himself has been having second thoughts about building a time machine to go back and kill his own grandmother.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
I'm convinced that you could design a language about a tenth of the size of C++ (whichever way you measure size) providing roughly what C++ does.
- Bjarne S.
Aside from the fact that C++ is a steaming pile of needless complexity, the worst thing about it is the brain damage it does to coders who become proud of memorizing the minutia of said steaming pile, believing that this is equivalent to engineering skill.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I used to code on Delphi, based on Pascal, but also did some C++. The main difference I found was that if I made an error in Delphi the compiler found it and the big fix cycle was a few seconds. In C++ the compiler would find a way to interpret my code (as something I hadn't intended) and I would only find the error in unit test, with a big fix cycle of minutes. The benefit of C++ was that you could do ten things in one line. So Delphi was simpler and more verbose, C++ was briefer. But coding in Delphi was an order of magnitude faster.
No. There's a huge difference between learning the proper idioms of a language vs. needing to avoid dangerous, confusing, and hard to use aspects of a language.
Contrary to popular belief, C++ does not have very many aspects that should be avoided. The simple fact is that C++ is a reflection of how complicated high performance computing really is. If you don't understand C++ than you damn sure don't understand writing performant code, and are more than likely a contributing factor to why a computer in 2017 feels no faster than a computer from 2005, in spite of having a processor that is at least 20x faster. Far too many programmers are willing to (or only capable of) write dog-slow code, and release it. If software engineering were held to the same standard as any other engineering discipline, 80% of the "software engineers" out there would be barred from practicing due to incompetence. In what world would we allow someone with a 2 month correspondence course to perform architectural engineering? How about electrical engineering? Or Civil engineering? Ok, maybe Civil Engineering...
Those who complain that C++ is too complicated, do not understand how computers actually work. If they did, they would know why C++ is the way it is, and would know how to use it. They would also know why most other languages should be considered inferior. Instead, they display their own ignorance.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Why do you need to separately declare and then define every piece of your API? Because that's how C worked, and C did it that way because of the limitations of compilers in 1977. It's totally unnecessary in a modern language, and it makes your code way less clean. But that's how C++ works.
You don't have to. You can define all your code inside of the class, like in Java. It's up to the compiler/linker to store that mess somewhere. But for non-template code, it's more efficient (speed and memory) to have this separated, for both compiling and linking.
Why are templates designed in a way that makes you put the entire implementation in the header file? That was totally unnecessary, and it leads to clunky code. But that's how C++ works.
Because the compiling of the template is totally depending of the template arguments. Last time I've looked into Java, there were no templates (or even variadic templates), so this is really not comparable.
How come if a parent class doesn't mark its destructor as virtual, all subclasses will (silently) fail to get cleaned up correctly? This is just bad design. It's probably caused countless bugs over the years.
Only if the subclasses have virtual functions, then you should also make the destructor virtual. There are good reasons to have non-virtual destructors in parent classes. Why should I pay for a feature, if I don't need it? Here static code analysis helps.
The language is full of inconsistencies because no one ever bothered to fix them. Why is "this" a pointer instead of a reference?
Is this really an inconsitency? For me, pointers are no problem, they are an additional grade of freedom for expressing what I want. Yes, references are internally only pointers with the same speed and they normally don't have the value 0 (as long as you did not mess them up), but last is also true for 'this'. So it really doesn't matter.
Why does exception.what() return a char* instead of a string&?
Good question, but nearly irrelevant in well designed programs, that try to avoid exceptions during normal program flow. However, if you want to concatenate constant strings at compile time to get better error messages, there are tricks with variadic templates. With gcc, this even works with __PRETTY_FUNCTION__.
There are tons of minor points like this that could easily have been better if someone had bothered to think about consistency. But no one did. You can avoid the worst parts of C++, but what remains is still a poor substitute for a well designed language.
Perhaps. This language is for professionals. It is huge and there are pitfalls. But it gives you the neccessary freedom to express *exactly* what you want. C had been designed as a shortcut for Assembler and this is still true for C++; there is no virtual machine in between. If you write business applications, well, then use something else, but I do embedded development in the automotive sector and here C++ is exactly what I want.
You're welcome to relegate Pascal to the equivalent bin as COBOL, when there is another language that offers what Free Pascal and its corresponding Lazarus IDE offer: cross-platform RAD resulting in lightning fast native executables on more platforms than any other development solution that I know of - all of it at no cost.