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I don't get how you make the connection from Torvald's arguments to what you say. His complaints are on a fundamentally different level: ~"Programmers over-abst

by jlg23 9y ago

I don't get how you make the connection from Torvald's arguments to what you say. His complaints are on a fundamentally different level: ~"Programmers over-abstracting are a timeless problem, the more complex the language/standard library, the easier it is for programmers to get lost in abstraction. Bad programmers just get lost, mediocre programmers even defend what they do." I despise his choice of words and general attitude towards programmers "less capable than him", but I do think there is some truth in what he says there: Imagine we'd all be writing asm only - we'd spend much more time on the drawing board and find much more elegant solutions to problems that we today solve with mindlessly writing hundreds lines of code within a "framework". Side note: I wrote C++ in 1998; it was more "bloody massive" back then than it is today, in my humble experience.

alxlaz 9y ago
I was referring only to the parts of that rant that are/were of some objective value, e.g.: > anybody who tells me that STL and especially Boost are stable and portable is just so full of BS that it's not even funny > the only way to do good, efficient, and system-level and portable C++ ends up to limit yourself to all the things that are basically available in C. You can certainly write C++ code without overabstracting it. Maybe Torvalds only ran into C++ programmers who liked overabstracting their code -- as it is usually the case with opinions of some people about other people, that part of the rant is best discarded :-). But as my memory serves me, back when "portability" meant x86, SPARC, Alpha, ARM, MIPS, PPC, PA-RISC and m68k, the only way to do "good, efficient, and system-level and portable C++" was to limit yourself to the (relatively small) subset of C++ that was well-implemented by widely-available compilers (particularly GCC) across all these architectures -- not as a matter of discipline and code elegance, but because writing non-trivial C++ code back then usually resulted in very unpleasant trips down the standard library's source code and poring over objdump outputs trying to figure out what the hell broke this time.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Yeah, which is why Java felt like fresh air compared with those portability hurdles.

by jlg23 9y ago

alxlaz 9y ago

I was referring only to the parts of that rant that are/were of some objective value, e.g.: > anybody who tells me that STL and especially Boost are stable and portable is just so full of BS that it's not even funny > the only way to do good, efficient, and system-level and portable C++ ends up to limit yourself to all the things that are basically available in C. You can certainly write C++ code without overabstracting it. Maybe Torvalds only ran into C++ programmers who liked overabstracting their code -- as it is usually the case with opinions of some people about other people, that part of the rant is best discarded :-). But as my memory serves me, back when "portability" meant x86, SPARC, Alpha, ARM, MIPS, PPC, PA-RISC and m68k, the only way to do "good, efficient, and system-level and portable C++" was to limit yourself to the (relatively small) subset of C++ that was well-implemented by widely-available compilers (particularly GCC) across all these architectures -- not as a matter of discipline and code elegance, but because writing non-trivial C++ code back then usually resulted in very unpleasant trips down the standard library's source code and poring over objdump outputs trying to figure out what the hell broke this time.

pjmlp 9y ago
Yeah, which is why Java felt like fresh air compared with those portability hurdles.