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If only it was a reliability/robustness/simplicity beast instead. Instead, it's evolved to be this atrocity of unspeakable proportions that continues to wreak h
by armitron 10y ago
If only it was a reliability/robustness/simplicity beast instead. Instead, it's evolved to be this atrocity of unspeakable proportions that continues to wreak havoc (security bugs, technical debt, complexity) pretty much everywhere it's used. When the best C++ developers on the planet can not do better than that, you know we have a problem.
It remains to be seen if the alternatives that are now slowly emerging will replace it. My personal estimation based on all the expert C++ programmers I know is that this will not happen through people abandoning C++ since it sits so high on the abstract ladder of complexity that for one to even begin to question its foundations (and all the time/years/decades one has sank into becoming an expert C++ programmer) will be a Tower-of-Babel moment. On top of that you have the (quite illusionary) tremendous feeling of empowerment one gets when using something that required such an investment to master.
JWZ once wrote (on an unrelated topic):
“No matter how hard you try, you can’t make a racehorse out of a pig. You can, however, make a faster pig.”
This seems fitting to the way C++ is evolving.
- dalke 10y agoJohn Steinbeck, "East of Eden" (1952). "You can’t make a race horse of a pig. — No, said Samuel, but you can make a very fast pig." https://books.google.se/books?id=OPy6E5ZhXs0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=East+of+Eden&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=racehorse&f=false https://books.google.se/books?id=OPy6E5ZhXs0C&printsec=front...
- jnordwick 10y agoIf by JWZ you mean John Steinbeck. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/68772-yes-you-will-and-i-will-warn-you-now-that http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/68772-yes-you-will-and-i-wil...
- user5994461 10y agoShould quote this one as well: (3) With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1925 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1925
- pjmlp 10y agoLanguages like C++ only get replaced when OS vendors force developers to use something else. That is how both C and C++ pushed other alternatives away from the market. So right now UNIX vendors don't care for alternatives, Apple is pushing Swift, Google and Microsoft are on the improving C++ with Go and .NET Native for the use cases one doesn't need C++ level features and a few embedded OS vendors have Ads, Basic and Pascal compilers alongside their C and C++ compilers. Finally console vendors are still only having C and C++ on their SDKs. Then there is Rust and D, none of them being pushed in OS SDKs. However Mozilla is actually increasing the amount of Rust code being used in Firefox. So something positive there. So it doesn't look like a clear winner exists for the near future.
- stevedonovan 10y agoIt's easy to be blinded by the size of that investment, both technical and emotional. Still enjoy the new C++ though.