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It's an April fool's day joke in the best tradition: a parody almost indistinguishable from truth. C++ has jumped the shark. Prima facie C was created as a por

by titzer 9y ago

It's an April fool's day joke in the best tradition: a parody almost indistinguishable from truth. C++ has jumped the shark. Prima facie C was created as a portable assembly language that very nearly reflected the underlying hardware. Then C++ added new abstraction mechanisms on top of C, that were at first totally orthogonal: just classes and templates. One could still use all of C to get at the raw machine (raw pointers and peeking/poking). Then as abstraction envy grew to overcome C++, as it does every active language in time, C++ drifted farther and farther from its system-y roots. Fine. But in my day job, the only real reason to use C++ is because it's the only realistic choice as a systems language. I need to peek and poke memory, jump to raw machine code I've generated at runtime. This doesn't make me better or worse, it's just my use case (a virtual machine). As C++ becomes less and less capable of doing these low-level unsafe things (because too many people caused too much damage attempting this), and adds more ceremony to the old ways of peeking and poking memory, it becomes less useful to me. Who is it useful for? I'd argue that C++ has drifted off into some fantasy world where it believes it's a beautiful language full of nice, solid abstractions. But IMO it isn't--probably can't be--as all the abstractions break down, leaving us in the lurch, with neither good systems programming support nor good application-level abstraction.

electrograv 9y ago
> I'd argue that C++ has drifted off into some fantasy world where it believes it's a beautiful language full of nice, solid abstractions. But IMO it isn't--probably can't be--as all the abstractions break down, leaving us in the lurch, with neither good systems programming support nor good application-level abstraction. I’m not sure I’d say all the abstractions break down. If you and your team can agree on a subset of C++ features and patterns that work really well, you really can have some nice, clean code that yields both effective abstractions and good system-level results. The problem with C++ is that it’s effectively a giant pile of tools, that keeps getting new tools dumped on the pile every few years —- some of which meant to “replace” older tools, yet rarely remove any tools (for fear of breaking backwards compatibility). So the pile keeps getting bigger and bigger, until it some day collapses under its own weight of complexity (maybe). Skilled craftspeople can still use these tools to great effect, but there is at least an organizational overhead and danger from how cluttered and huge the set of tools is: every person or team may use a different subset of tools due to differing preference, not knowing about all the tools, not using some tools “properly”, using the “bad” tools, etc. etc.
- Lorkki 9y ago
  To strain the analogy a bit further - that's the thing about going to a hardware store. Bringing everything home is not really useful, so you'll have to be educated on which tools are needed for your job. And possibly all you really wanted was a hammer, and that's perfectly fine too.
maxlybbert 9y ago
I don’t know if the joke is about C++ or the committee, which has approved many things that don’t feel like C++ to me (i.e., I strongly suspect that some committee members aren’t big fans of the language). That said, I fell for this joke.
Mindless2112 9y ago
> C++ has drifted off into some fantasy world I like what E. W. Dijkstra had to say in "The Humble Programmer": > Finally, although the subject is not a pleasant one, I must mention C++, a programming language for which the defining documentation is of a frightening size and complexity. Using C++ must be like flying a plane with 7000 buttons, switches and handles to manipulate in the cockpit. I absolutely fail to see how we can keep our growing programs firmly within our intellectual grip when by its sheer baroqueness the programming language —our basic tool, mind you!— already escapes our intellectual control. And if I have to describe the influence C++ can have on its users, the closest metaphor that comes to my mind is that of a drug. I remember from a symposium on higher level programming language a lecture given in defense of C++ by a man who described himself as one of its devoted users. But within a one-hour lecture in praise of C++. he managed to ask for the addition of about fifty new “features”, little supposing that the main source of his problems could very well be that it contained already far too many “features”. The speaker displayed all the depressing symptoms of addiction, reduced as he was to the state of mental stagnation in which he could only ask for more, more, more... When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, full C++, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could turn out to be a fatal disease. April fool's. He actually said that about PL/1 [1]. [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340...
- titzer 9y ago
  Great quote, thanks!
FrankHB 9y ago
> Then C++ added new abstraction mechanisms on top of C, that were at first totally orthogonal: just classes and templates. Not quite. Classes are based on struct types in C. Templates are based on classes, function types, and more. > As C++ becomes less and less capable of doing these low-level unsafe things (because too many people caused too much damage attempting this), and adds more ceremony to the old ways of peeking and poking memory, it becomes less useful to me. This is not the truth. It is just never supported in a portable way. And there is no other choice. ISO C is also always lack of that capability (if not more restricted). Nevertheless, you can still rely on the usefulness provided by implementations, as-is.

by titzer 9y ago

electrograv 9y ago

> I'd argue that C++ has drifted off into some fantasy world where it believes it's a beautiful language full of nice, solid abstractions. But IMO it isn't--probably can't be--as all the abstractions break down, leaving us in the lurch, with neither good systems programming support nor good application-level abstraction. I’m not sure I’d say all the abstractions break down. If you and your team can agree on a subset of C++ features and patterns that work really well, you really can have some nice, clean code that yields both effective abstractions and good system-level results. The problem with C++ is that it’s effectively a giant pile of tools, that keeps getting new tools dumped on the pile every few years —- some of which meant to “replace” older tools, yet rarely remove any tools (for fear of breaking backwards compatibility). So the pile keeps getting bigger and bigger, until it some day collapses under its own weight of complexity (maybe). Skilled craftspeople can still use these tools to great effect, but there is at least an organizational overhead and danger from how cluttered and huge the set of tools is: every person or team may use a different subset of tools due to differing preference, not knowing about all the tools, not using some tools “properly”, using the “bad” tools, etc. etc.

Lorkki 9y ago
To strain the analogy a bit further - that's the thing about going to a hardware store. Bringing everything home is not really useful, so you'll have to be educated on which tools are needed for your job. And possibly all you really wanted was a hammer, and that's perfectly fine too.

maxlybbert 9y ago

I don’t know if the joke is about C++ or the committee, which has approved many things that don’t feel like C++ to me (i.e., I strongly suspect that some committee members aren’t big fans of the language). That said, I fell for this joke.

Mindless2112 9y ago

> C++ has drifted off into some fantasy world I like what E. W. Dijkstra had to say in "The Humble Programmer": > Finally, although the subject is not a pleasant one, I must mention C++, a programming language for which the defining documentation is of a frightening size and complexity. Using C++ must be like flying a plane with 7000 buttons, switches and handles to manipulate in the cockpit. I absolutely fail to see how we can keep our growing programs firmly within our intellectual grip when by its sheer baroqueness the programming language —our basic tool, mind you!— already escapes our intellectual control. And if I have to describe the influence C++ can have on its users, the closest metaphor that comes to my mind is that of a drug. I remember from a symposium on higher level programming language a lecture given in defense of C++ by a man who described himself as one of its devoted users. But within a one-hour lecture in praise of C++. he managed to ask for the addition of about fifty new “features”, little supposing that the main source of his problems could very well be that it contained already far too many “features”. The speaker displayed all the depressing symptoms of addiction, reduced as he was to the state of mental stagnation in which he could only ask for more, more, more... When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, full C++, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could turn out to be a fatal disease. April fool's. He actually said that about PL/1 [1]. [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340...

titzer 9y ago
Great quote, thanks!

FrankHB 9y ago

> Then C++ added new abstraction mechanisms on top of C, that were at first totally orthogonal: just classes and templates. Not quite. Classes are based on struct types in C. Templates are based on classes, function types, and more. > As C++ becomes less and less capable of doing these low-level unsafe things (because too many people caused too much damage attempting this), and adds more ceremony to the old ways of peeking and poking memory, it becomes less useful to me. This is not the truth. It is just never supported in a portable way. And there is no other choice. ISO C is also always lack of that capability (if not more restricted). Nevertheless, you can still rely on the usefulness provided by implementations, as-is.