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Hey Sean, thanks for chiming in. Do you think C++ isn't liked in academia because of any bias against languages that are more practical than formal, or anything
by jasim 8y ago
Hey Sean, thanks for chiming in. Do you think C++ isn't liked in academia because of any bias against languages that are more practical than formal, or anything in the language's nature itself?
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoC++ is just super hard in its design: it can’t be parsed easily, so for a long time custom compilers were impossible. It’s support for generics was based on was basically macro expansion, it’s multiple inheritance scheme was poorly thought out. It was just painful to do anything with it as a user of the language or an implementer. OOP people were never much of a formal crowd, and they had plenty of niche languages to base their research around (smalltalk, CLOS, Eiffel, BETA, ...). And when Java came along, acedemics breathed a sigh of relief: finally they could work on a “practical” language that wasn’t totally insane. And everyone else who really didn’t need to be using C++ in the first place has similar ideas.
- jasim 8y agoGot it, thanks!