4 ms·
> I can summarize most people’s attitude I’m skeptical that there is a significant body of critics that share these patently conflicting views. More likely the
by weberc2 7y ago
> I can summarize most people’s attitude
I’m skeptical that there is a significant body of critics that share these patently conflicting views. More likely there are different groups who each value one of these, or more likely still, lots of individuals like me who are fine with specific, entirely consistent concessions from each of these major categories. For example, I would like to see C++ support some sane build and package ecosystem and I’m ok if it breaks my projects. I would also be happy to do away with the C compatibility requirements.
It would probably be too much to ask to re-evaluate every design decision that was predicated on C compatibility, but I would be okay with reevaluating them gradually over decades, deprecating language features here and there. In general we need to get rid of the idea that we only need to write software once and then every future version of the toolchain will support it. Instead I would like to see a world where the language changes gradually and project maintainers simply have to make small, almost mechanical changes every 5 years or so.
- d1zzy 7y ago> I’m skeptical that there is a significant body of critics that share these patently conflicting views. If I take a serious look at my own C++ needs I do find myself having those contradicting views. Essentially what I find is that for areas of the language that do not pertain much to my day to day work I'm fine with "simplifying" (even if it means removing features, because I don't need those features) but for the things I work on (which I'll be the first to admit are likely quite rare in the general C++ population) it would be a deal breaker if the features that I use but most other people don't get removed.
- weberc2 7y agoThose aren’t contradictory views; you are consistent, but your views aren’t consistent with those of the “other people” you refer to, which is my point.
- matthewowen 7y agoI think it depends on how you frame it. "If we could just add this one feature, we could get rid of these five crufty features that I think are obviated by it" is a fairly common sentiment in my experience.