You're assuming that Microsoft actually writes code from scratch. Almost every app they have was acquired from some other company and hacked to fit into Microsoft's way of doing things.
The reason a lot of MS apps are so bad is not because of MS (although it often is) but rather because the original company that wrote the app wrote bad code and MS is either unable or unwilling to properly fix it.
I've long ago stopped trying to think logically about how companies would work since they seldom work in a way that makes sense.
In Episdoe 1, Yoda (and the entire Jedi Council) refused to take in a prodigy with the most powerful potential in the Force ever for no good reason other than they didn't feel like dealing with someone so "old". Now tell me that isn't an invitation for Darth Whomever to get ahold of this kid and train him for nefarious purposes. It might not be evil, but it sure seems negligent.
That's the biggest problem I have with the whole Star Wars story because it just doesn't make any sense to me.
Obi-wan takes on Anakin's identity for some reason... it would be consistent with his character in Episode I if something hacked him off at the other Jedis enough for him to go evil.
Yoda evil? That's the _only_ explanation for his actions in Episode 1, IMO. Completely illogical... but of course Lucas could have expounded a little more on the Jedi Council's discussions rather than giving us 83 gruelling minutes of the pod racing. Maybe then it would have made a little sense.
Sounds like something David Brin said. I've been a fan of that theory for years, but I doubt it's going to happen.
The one thing I could say about the Star Wars movies is that almost no one is who he or she seems to be at first. This doesn't seem to apply to the newer movies as much as the original trilogy, but I'd always assumed that one of the big plot twists in Episode 3 will be something of this nature (e.g., Yoda is evil, Obi-Wan becomes Darth Vader, Jar-Jar becomes the Emperor, etc).
Oh well, we still gotta wait another year and a half.
These are great ideas. The biggest drawback for XP, aside from the fact that it offers very little over Win2K for the typical user (other than compatibility for old software) is that it takes bunches more hardware to run it. I've got a machine which has productively run Linux and/or Windows 2000 for years but it was completely unusable with XP. The machines in question at the church are pretty old and I'd be afraid that XP would slow them down too much.
You also have to remember we are talking about people who are barely computer literate, if that. Any change in the environment would affect them 100 times more than it would you or me. So any kind of free OS would be out of the question, because there are plenty of Windows apps they use too (like Word, Outlook, etc).
We are also looking at doing this for the absolute minimum possible cost. I'd pay for the upgrades myself if I was actually working... as it is though I'm more than happy to help these good folks out any way I can.
A resume isn't a resume any more, it's a list of keywords for some recruiter to search on. He doesn't know what the words means, he's just looking for matches....and I say this as a foolishly steadfast person who refuses to put anything on his resume that he can't back up 100%. If I say I can do, then, dammit, I can do it.
It's not your father's job market out there. Employees are commodities, on about the same level as office furniture, except the office furniture gets to stick around longer. You are not a person with a unique set of skills, but rather a list of keywords that may or may not have any bearing on your skill set, or even worse, the intangible benefits of a well-rounded education.
What employers seem to want today is an idiot savant. Someone with superior skill in whatever particular item they are interested in (or think they are interested in), and they don't give a damn about anything else.
I know from experience that "thinking out of the box" may be an overused and supposedly virtuous cliche term, but most managers wouldn't know how to do it and would be frightened or angry if their employees actually did.
I just survived 5 months at a place where, based on my resume and interview (I'm a Windows C++ programmer with 16 years professional programming experience), they couldn't hire me fast enough, but insisted I work like an entry-level person. If an entry-level programmer couldn't walk in on what I was doing at any time and immediately understand it, they didn't want to see it. I probably pee'd a few people off when I suggested that the 4-programmer team I was on could easily be replaced by one programmer and a couple of QA people at about half the cost, and then explained how. But of course, this is government work, you aren't paid the most for getting the job done quickly, you are paid the most for billing the most hours before the deadline.
Sorry, but I'm just a bit cynical about it all these days.
If your network is connected to the internet it is a death sentence. It is almost guarenteed that in two years someone will find an exploit, and exploit you specificly.
Not, I think, if you are taking reasonable precautions (firewalling, antivirus, etc).
Fact is, we are proposing to the pastor that we upgrade the machines to 2000 (they are not too old to handle it), assuming the DOS software (yes, DOS software) they still use can be run on Win2K. He's a smart guy and I'm sure he will go for it when we lay out the proposal and explain the pros and cons.
Besides, _he_ runs Win2k...
I don't know the specifics of what's supposed to happen in the new building, just that I'm trying to help them minimize problems for the next two years.
I know this was meant as a joke but Windows 98 was stillborn. I sucked on day one and it sucks today. Problem is I volunteer at my church to maintain their network and software and until we can convince the pastor to upgrade, I'll have to continue to support it.
We wouldn't bother upgrading because they will be moving to a new building with a new network and everything two years, but the fact of the matter is that you can't set up a Windows 98 network, work through all the pain and pathetic Microsoft crap and then leave it alone once it works because it never stays working for long.
Microsoft may be abandoning the product but the fact of the matter is that they couldn't be bothered to make it not suck in the first place and there will be millions of people saddled with support this sorry piece of crap whether MS supports it or not.
If we were talking about Windows 2000 it would be a different story because Win2k was and continues to be a viable and stable platform. In fact, with the NT line, there hasn't been compelling reasons to upgrade for about 5 years except for support of new hardware. That's the problem... when you actually do something right, you lose the upgrade track because people are actually satisfied.
That's why MS never cared about the DOS branch of their OS's. They knew they would sell bazillions of copies, but when called on the carpet for its crappy quality, they could just point to the NT branch.
Now that those branches have merged, I guess they have to start making all their OS's suck, or run the risk of having too many satisfied customers.
It did, but what else has occurred to me, which is far more plausible, IMO, is that the people who are so fanatical about these games are the kind of people that would be prone to violence in the first place.
I would be willing to do that, to a point. My problem is that people have told me my resume is too literal. It doesn't convey my true level of experience in the context of most resumes, which are apparently well-padded. But I can back up everything I claim 100%. Maybe I could improve it, but I would never try to make it out to be something it isn't.
Of course, right now, the only job I've got pays zilch... maybe some VC money will come in, but over the last 18 months, I've done quite a bit of work just because the guy I'm working for is a nice guy and I believe in what he's doing. Now that my day gig laid me off, I'd love to work full-time for him, but until he can pay me, I gotta look elsewhere. House payments don't take vacations.:-(
The so-called "Interstate Commerce" clause played a pretty big part in that too. Seems any time anyone crosses a state line within 500-miles of someone doing something Congress wants to control, they invoke that clause and Presto! the 9th and 10th amendments are once again neutered.
Would Jefferson, Madison, et al even recognize the government they created if they could see it now? About the only thing in the Bill of Rights you don't see violated routinely is the bit about quartering soldiers.
I agree with you up to the point where you say hardened doors would have been useless. How could the terrorists have gotten control of the plane?
Do you think the pilot would have let them at the threat of them hurting passengers? Nothing good could have come from letting them take over the plane, if it could be prevented.
You are right, though, surprise was their biggest advantage. They won't have that again, _but_, I still think there are many ways for them to successfully wreak havoc on the airlines and elsewhere. I'm just a little tired of politicians going for the appearance of doing something useful instead of making the tough but effective choices.
Maybe I'm a pessimist, but about the time the airplane flew into the Pentagon, I had a sick feeling we were going to find out what happened to those missing Russian nukes... I very glad reality didn't live up to my fevered imaginings.
Despite failing to prevent 9/11, I do give lots of credit to the FBI for preventing foreign terror in our country for many years. When it seemed there was a disco exploding in Germany every other week, I always wondered when they would hit the U.S., but for many years they never did. Clinton pointed out that under his administration we stopped something like 15 major terror attacks (like the bomb heading to L.A. in 2000), and I don't doubt it.
The terrorists took over using friggin' BOX KNIVES! I, for one, do NOT want to see the level of paranoid security that would be required to prevent someone from carrying a tiny razor-blade sized knife on board.
You mean a level of security the airlines convinced us already existed? 9/11 wouldn't have happened if the cockpit doors could simply have been hardened and locked. The terrorists could slit every throat in the cabin and the pilots would never have flown into a building. We pay the government to come up with these ideas so they can protect us from it. THe problem is not that someone didn't come up with the idea, the problem is that airlines and the FAA are too lazy to implement the proper protections. Otherwise they would have been installed in weeks instead of months. It took over a year to start implementing the hardened doors after 9/11. Why did it take so long to implement such an absurdly simple idea. Because security _still_ isn't a priority. Poeple don't avoid El Al because of security hassles, yet we still have people smuggling box cutters on American airplanes with impunity. I guess it will take another 9/11 before anyone starts acting decisively and effectively.
I don't think the passengers were being excessively optimistic. I think they were doing the best thing based on the information they had. The actions taken aboard the Pennsylvania flight proves what the passengers would have done if they'd had any idea. Otherwise, pointless heroics and getting yourself gutted for no reason wouldn't have solved the problem.
You can be sure that passengers won't let this happen again, even if the airline security fails.
While I will agree that it is as much as style decision as anything, I hardly find that there are increased costs. To me, it just helps make code that much more self documenting.
Try reading Terry Pratchett's children's books and you'll see the difference. Despite being written for kids, the stories have depth, as do the characters. There are two series of three books each: "The Bromeliad" ("Truckers", "Diggers" and "Wings") and the Johnny series "Johnny and the Bomb", "Johnny and the Dead" and "Only You Can Save Mankind"
Good action and neat things for the kids, but subtle humor and character depth that adults will appreciate. This is what sets good children's material apart from the mass-market brain-dead crap. That's why the Looney Tunes are my kids favorite cartoons and mine too. They like Pokemon, but there's nothing in it for me.
In fact, if you look at almost any children's book written more than 50 years ago, you'll find the same thing. Look at "The Wind in the Willows" for crying out loud. You'd have to dumb that down to get it to the average level of adult books these days.
I won't pass judgement on the HP books as I haven't read them, but I have read numerous "children's books" to my kids that I consider to be excellent literature.
"Tom Sawyer" The original Winnie the Pooh books "The Hobbit" "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" The original Thomas the Tank Engine books... very good for the 2 - 5 year olds, but still entertaining for older kids.
"The Wind in the Willows"... we actually didn't make it far into this one because it was a little too dry for the kids. The syntax and grammar in that book are really complex.
There are many other great examples.
I guess the only thing we can all agree on is that the general level of writing has decrease significantly in the last 100+ years. There's certainly good popular literature to be found, but when you compare it to popular literature from 100 years ago, it's frightening how much simpler much of it is, at least from a language point of view.
What I can say about the HP books, based on the few pages I have read is that she does a good job using more sophisticated language, which is sorely needed in today's world.
OOP isn't a kludge when used correctly. It makes it easier to get work done. The whole point of computers is to hide the user from the ugly details. The same goes for software development tools. Good OOP code (something, IMO, I've almost never seen, especially from Microsoft) hides you from the details unless you really want to see them, and eliminates the mundane hassles, while allowing you to focus on the actual problem you are trying to solve.
I know that there are good people who swear by straight C, but I wouldn't want to work that way, and I'm confident that I can show that my way is objectively better.
However, at the end of the day, if you get the work done and your boss is happy, then there's no problem. At least until someone else has to look at your code.;-)
Let's just say my time at this firm was punctuated by some really ugly exchanges. Like the following:
Me: "The very first Windows programming book you read will describe... [Hungarian notation]"
Project engineer: "Stop. We don't read books here."
What was even worse was the brown-shirts in IT that showed up at my desk one day rudely chastising me for violating their rules aboout not modifying the machines for bringing in my own mouse and keyboard. It would have almost been reasonable if they had been polite about it, but I guess that would take more than two neurons to rub together.
I commented at the time that if plugging in a keyboard broke the rules then plugging in headphones should also be against the rules. They agreed. Then I asked why didn't they enforce that policy when almost everyone on the floor had headphones plugged into their PC's. Needless to say, the conversation went downhill from there.
Agreed. My style tends to be fairly abstract, but in the end it uses the features of C++ well, without going into some of the more weird and dangerous stuff.
I do practice zealotry myself, but in the opposite direction. I do not use templates, although I see their value in some instances. I've worked out a system that uses macros in much the same way. Yes, go ahead and cringe, but it's just as easy to use and it gains some benefits that STL doesn't have... like a single, simple iterator class that works with all collections.
Actually, once I studied Java (the language, not the hideous class library, or at least hideous in 2000, maybe it's better now), I found it to be quite elegant, and that, in fact, my usage of C++ was very much in the style of Java. For instance, the lack of multiple inheritence was heresy in my mind, until I found out that Java supports interface classes, which is exactly the way I use MI.
When I had to use code that was written with STL, I had to do some debugging, and believe me, you are right. STL is a nightmare... especially MS's implementation in VS6, because yhou have to work so hard to get the include files in the right order so the durn thing will build. Or at least that's what happened to me.
One thing I swore would happen in _my_ class library was that you only needed to include files for the classes you wanted to use. All dependencies were worked out so you could include , then include other files, whichever ones you wanted to use, in any order, and they would compile just fine. Try that with Microsoft.
Of course, I haven't used VS.NET much. Seeing as how it compiled the same code about 4 times slower turned me off to using. Also, nowhere that I've worked has used it yet either. I know the quirks and bugs of VS6 and it's libraries, and I'm happy to keep using that for now. In any event, I have no desire to get into managed code or whatever nightmare the current MS technology du jour is. I haven't seen anything done by Microsoft that couldn't be handled perfectly well with their tools from 6 years ago and a little good design.
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You're assuming that Microsoft actually writes code from scratch. Almost every app they have was acquired from some other company and hacked to fit into Microsoft's way of doing things.
The reason a lot of MS apps are so bad is not because of MS (although it often is) but rather because the original company that wrote the app wrote bad code and MS is either unable or unwilling to properly fix it.
I've long ago stopped trying to think logically about how companies would work since they seldom work in a way that makes sense.
In Episdoe 1, Yoda (and the entire Jedi Council) refused to take in a prodigy with the most powerful potential in the Force ever for no good reason other than they didn't feel like dealing with someone so "old". Now tell me that isn't an invitation for Darth Whomever to get ahold of this kid and train him for nefarious purposes. It might not be evil, but it sure seems negligent.
That's the biggest problem I have with the whole Star Wars story because it just doesn't make any sense to me.
Maybe they are hoping that we'll spend so much time laughing at their incompetence that we won't notice they're incompetent.
Obi-wan takes on Anakin's identity for some reason... it would be consistent with his character in Episode I if something hacked him off at the other Jedis enough for him to go evil.
Yoda evil? That's the _only_ explanation for his actions in Episode 1, IMO. Completely illogical... but of course Lucas could have expounded a little more on the Jedi Council's discussions rather than giving us 83 gruelling minutes of the pod racing. Maybe then it would have made a little sense.
Perhaps. I think you are right except you replace "businessmen" with "politicians" and "board meetings" with "campaigns".
Sounds like something David Brin said. I've been a fan of that theory for years, but I doubt it's going to happen.
The one thing I could say about the Star Wars movies is that almost no one is who he or she seems to be at first. This doesn't seem to apply to the newer movies as much as the original trilogy, but I'd always assumed that one of the big plot twists in Episode 3 will be something of this nature (e.g., Yoda is evil, Obi-Wan becomes Darth Vader, Jar-Jar becomes the Emperor, etc).
Oh well, we still gotta wait another year and a half.
These are great ideas. The biggest drawback for XP, aside from the fact that it offers very little over Win2K for the typical user (other than compatibility for old software) is that it takes bunches more hardware to run it. I've got a machine which has productively run Linux and/or Windows 2000 for years but it was completely unusable with XP. The machines in question at the church are pretty old and I'd be afraid that XP would slow them down too much.
You also have to remember we are talking about people who are barely computer literate, if that. Any change in the environment would affect them 100 times more than it would you or me. So any kind of free OS would be out of the question, because there are plenty of Windows apps they use too (like Word, Outlook, etc).
We are also looking at doing this for the absolute minimum possible cost. I'd pay for the upgrades myself if I was actually working... as it is though I'm more than happy to help these good folks out any way I can.
Absolutely true.
...and I say this as a foolishly steadfast person who refuses to put anything on his resume that he can't back up 100%. If I say I can do, then, dammit, I can do it.
A resume isn't a resume any more, it's a list of keywords for some recruiter to search on. He doesn't know what the words means, he's just looking for matches.
It's not your father's job market out there. Employees are commodities, on about the same level as office furniture, except the office furniture gets to stick around longer. You are not a person with a unique set of skills, but rather a list of keywords that may or may not have any bearing on your skill set, or even worse, the intangible benefits of a well-rounded education.
What employers seem to want today is an idiot savant. Someone with superior skill in whatever particular item they are interested in (or think they are interested in), and they don't give a damn about anything else.
I know from experience that "thinking out of the box" may be an overused and supposedly virtuous cliche term, but most managers wouldn't know how to do it and would be frightened or angry if their employees actually did.
I just survived 5 months at a place where, based on my resume and interview (I'm a Windows C++ programmer with 16 years professional programming experience), they couldn't hire me fast enough, but insisted I work like an entry-level person. If an entry-level programmer couldn't walk in on what I was doing at any time and immediately understand it, they didn't want to see it. I probably pee'd a few people off when I suggested that the 4-programmer team I was on could easily be replaced by one programmer and a couple of QA people at about half the cost, and then explained how. But of course, this is government work, you aren't paid the most for getting the job done quickly, you are paid the most for billing the most hours before the deadline.
Sorry, but I'm just a bit cynical about it all these days.
If your network is connected to the internet it is a death sentence. It is almost guarenteed that in two years someone will find an exploit, and exploit you specificly.
Not, I think, if you are taking reasonable precautions (firewalling, antivirus, etc).
Fact is, we are proposing to the pastor that we upgrade the machines to 2000 (they are not too old to handle it), assuming the DOS software (yes, DOS software) they still use can be run on Win2K. He's a smart guy and I'm sure he will go for it when we lay out the proposal and explain the pros and cons.
Besides, _he_ runs Win2k...
I don't know the specifics of what's supposed to happen in the new building, just that I'm trying to help them minimize problems for the next two years.
The Satinic Church? Nice sheets, huh?
Maybe you could convince him to run BSD. After all, his picture's on it.
That's not as bad as the companies that are looking for so much experience that it's not humanly possible to achieve it.
One listing I saw recently had 8 years of this and 5 years of that, etc, for a total of 39 years of experience.
Yeah, right. I had 5 years of Windows 2000 programming experience back in the mid 60's.
Spell check won't catch when you mistake "loose" for "lose". ;-)
I know this was meant as a joke but Windows 98 was stillborn. I sucked on day one and it sucks today. Problem is I volunteer at my church to maintain their network and software and until we can convince the pastor to upgrade, I'll have to continue to support it.
We wouldn't bother upgrading because they will be moving to a new building with a new network and everything two years, but the fact of the matter is that you can't set up a Windows 98 network, work through all the pain and pathetic Microsoft crap and then leave it alone once it works because it never stays working for long.
Microsoft may be abandoning the product but the fact of the matter is that they couldn't be bothered to make it not suck in the first place and there will be millions of people saddled with support this sorry piece of crap whether MS supports it or not.
If we were talking about Windows 2000 it would be a different story because Win2k was and continues to be a viable and stable platform. In fact, with the NT line, there hasn't been compelling reasons to upgrade for about 5 years except for support of new hardware. That's the problem... when you actually do something right, you lose the upgrade track because people are actually satisfied.
That's why MS never cared about the DOS branch of their OS's. They knew they would sell bazillions of copies, but when called on the carpet for its crappy quality, they could just point to the NT branch.
Now that those branches have merged, I guess they have to start making all their OS's suck, or run the risk of having too many satisfied customers.
It did, but what else has occurred to me, which is far more plausible, IMO, is that the people who are so fanatical about these games are the kind of people that would be prone to violence in the first place.
Correlation does not mean causation.
I would be willing to do that, to a point. My problem is that people have told me my resume is too literal. It doesn't convey my true level of experience in the context of most resumes, which are apparently well-padded. But I can back up everything I claim 100%. Maybe I could improve it, but I would never try to make it out to be something it isn't.
:-(
Of course, right now, the only job I've got pays zilch... maybe some VC money will come in, but over the last 18 months, I've done quite a bit of work just because the guy I'm working for is a nice guy and I believe in what he's doing. Now that my day gig laid me off, I'd love to work full-time for him, but until he can pay me, I gotta look elsewhere. House payments don't take vacations.
The so-called "Interstate Commerce" clause played a pretty big part in that too. Seems any time anyone crosses a state line within 500-miles of someone doing something Congress wants to control, they invoke that clause and Presto! the 9th and 10th amendments are once again neutered.
Would Jefferson, Madison, et al even recognize the government they created if they could see it now? About the only thing in the Bill of Rights you don't see violated routinely is the bit about quartering soldiers.
the companies would rather hire you if you're talented and cheap.
But if they can only choose one, they'll go with "cheap" every time.
Sloppy definition of "Earthlike"
You can't expect all planets roughly 10000 miles in diameter to be just like Earth. Hopefully the Vegans have much better television.
I agree with you up to the point where you say hardened doors would have been useless. How could the terrorists have gotten control of the plane?
Do you think the pilot would have let them at the threat of them hurting passengers? Nothing good could have come from letting them take over the plane, if it could be prevented.
You are right, though, surprise was their biggest advantage. They won't have that again, _but_, I still think there are many ways for them to successfully wreak havoc on the airlines and elsewhere. I'm just a little tired of politicians going for the appearance of doing something useful instead of making the tough but effective choices.
Maybe I'm a pessimist, but about the time the airplane flew into the Pentagon, I had a sick feeling we were going to find out what happened to those missing Russian nukes... I very glad reality didn't live up to my fevered imaginings.
Despite failing to prevent 9/11, I do give lots of credit to the FBI for preventing foreign terror in our country for many years. When it seemed there was a disco exploding in Germany every other week, I always wondered when they would hit the U.S., but for many years they never did. Clinton pointed out that under his administration we stopped something like 15 major terror attacks (like the bomb heading to L.A. in 2000), and I don't doubt it.
The terrorists took over using friggin' BOX KNIVES! I, for one, do NOT want to see the level of paranoid security that would be required to prevent someone from carrying a tiny razor-blade sized knife on board.
You mean a level of security the airlines convinced us already existed? 9/11 wouldn't have happened if the cockpit doors could simply have been hardened and locked. The terrorists could slit every throat in the cabin and the pilots would never have flown into a building. We pay the government to come up with these ideas so they can protect us from it. THe problem is not that someone didn't come up with the idea, the problem is that airlines and the FAA are too lazy to implement the proper protections. Otherwise they would have been installed in weeks instead of months.
It took over a year to start implementing the hardened doors after 9/11. Why did it take so long to implement such an absurdly simple idea. Because security _still_ isn't a priority. Poeple don't avoid El Al because of security hassles, yet we still have people smuggling box cutters on American airplanes with impunity. I guess it will take another 9/11 before anyone starts acting decisively and effectively.
I don't think the passengers were being excessively optimistic. I think they were doing the best thing based on the information they had. The actions taken aboard the Pennsylvania flight proves what the passengers would have done if they'd had any idea. Otherwise, pointless heroics and getting yourself gutted for no reason wouldn't have solved the problem.
You can be sure that passengers won't let this happen again, even if the airline security fails.
Increased costs?
While I will agree that it is as much as style decision as anything, I hardly find that there are increased costs. To me, it just helps make code that much more self documenting.
Try reading Terry Pratchett's children's books and you'll see the difference. Despite being written for kids, the stories have depth, as do the characters. There are two series of three books each: "The Bromeliad" ("Truckers", "Diggers" and "Wings") and the Johnny series "Johnny and the Bomb", "Johnny and the Dead" and "Only You Can Save Mankind"
Good action and neat things for the kids, but subtle humor and character depth that adults will appreciate. This is what sets good children's material apart from the mass-market brain-dead crap. That's why the Looney Tunes are my kids favorite cartoons and mine too. They like Pokemon, but there's nothing in it for me.
In fact, if you look at almost any children's book written more than 50 years ago, you'll find the same thing. Look at "The Wind in the Willows" for crying out loud. You'd have to dumb that down to get it to the average level of adult books these days.
I won't pass judgement on the HP books as I haven't read them, but I have read numerous "children's books" to my kids that I consider to be excellent literature.
"Tom Sawyer"
The original Winnie the Pooh books
"The Hobbit"
"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"
The original Thomas the Tank Engine books... very good for the 2 - 5 year olds, but still entertaining for older kids.
"The Wind in the Willows"... we actually didn't make it far into this one because it was a little too dry for the kids. The syntax and grammar in that book are really complex.
There are many other great examples.
I guess the only thing we can all agree on is that the general level of writing has decrease significantly in the last 100+ years. There's certainly good popular literature to be found, but when you compare it to popular literature from 100 years ago, it's frightening how much simpler much of it is, at least from a language point of view.
What I can say about the HP books, based on the few pages I have read is that she does a good job using more sophisticated language, which is sorely needed in today's world.
Simple doesn't have to mean stupid.
;-)
OOP isn't a kludge when used correctly. It makes it easier to get work done. The whole point of computers is to hide the user from the ugly details. The same goes for software development tools. Good OOP code (something, IMO, I've almost never seen, especially from Microsoft) hides you from the details unless you really want to see them, and eliminates the mundane hassles, while allowing you to focus on the actual problem you are trying to solve.
I know that there are good people who swear by straight C, but I wouldn't want to work that way, and I'm confident that I can show that my way is objectively better.
However, at the end of the day, if you get the work done and your boss is happy, then there's no problem. At least until someone else has to look at your code.
Let's just say my time at this firm was punctuated by some really ugly exchanges. Like the following:
Me: "The very first Windows programming book you read will describe... [Hungarian notation]"
Project engineer: "Stop. We don't read books here."
What was even worse was the brown-shirts in IT that showed up at my desk one day rudely chastising me for violating their rules aboout not modifying the machines for bringing in my own mouse and keyboard. It would have almost been reasonable if they had been polite about it, but I guess that would take more than two neurons to rub together.
I commented at the time that if plugging in a keyboard broke the rules then plugging in headphones should also be against the rules. They agreed. Then I asked why didn't they enforce that policy when almost everyone on the floor had headphones plugged into their PC's. Needless to say, the conversation went downhill from there.
Agreed. My style tends to be fairly abstract, but in the end it uses the features of C++ well, without going into some of the more weird and dangerous stuff.
.NET much. Seeing as how it compiled the same code about 4 times slower turned me off to using. Also, nowhere that I've worked has used it yet either. I know the quirks and bugs of VS6 and it's libraries, and I'm happy to keep using that for now. In any event, I have no desire to get into managed code or whatever nightmare the current MS technology du jour is. I haven't seen anything done by Microsoft that couldn't be handled perfectly well with their tools from 6 years ago and a little good design.
I do practice zealotry myself, but in the opposite direction. I do not use templates, although I see their value in some instances. I've worked out a system that uses macros in much the same way. Yes, go ahead and cringe, but it's just as easy to use and it gains some benefits that STL doesn't have... like a single, simple iterator class that works with all collections.
Actually, once I studied Java (the language, not the hideous class library, or at least hideous in 2000, maybe it's better now), I found it to be quite elegant, and that, in fact, my usage of C++ was very much in the style of Java. For instance, the lack of multiple inheritence was heresy in my mind, until I found out that Java supports interface classes, which is exactly the way I use MI.
When I had to use code that was written with STL, I had to do some debugging, and believe me, you are right. STL is a nightmare... especially MS's implementation in VS6, because yhou have to work so hard to get the include files in the right order so the durn thing will build. Or at least that's what happened to me.
One thing I swore would happen in _my_ class library was that you only needed to include files for the classes you wanted to use. All dependencies were worked out so you could include , then include other files, whichever ones you wanted to use, in any order, and they would compile just fine. Try that with Microsoft.
Of course, I haven't used VS