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>There'd been a number of spectacular C++ project failures, Do you have any examples in mind? Big corporate software project failures are always super int

>There'd been a number of spectacular C++ project failures, Do you have any examples in mind? Big corporate software project failures are always super interesting imo. Especially those that happened during such pivotal times as rhe 1990s.

chubot 6y ago
I wasn't there, but apparently Taligent was a failed C++ operating system from Apple and IBM in the 90's. I think there is a talk on YouTube by Bryan Cantrill that gives some color on it... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent http://bobcongdon.net/blog/2004/06/the-taligent-effect/ http://bobcongdon.net/blog/2004/06/the-taligent-effect/
- lou1306 6y ago
  The Digital Antiquarian also touches on Taligent in his post about the IBM/Apple "alliance" in the 90s: https://www.filfre.net/2020/02/the-deal-of-the-century-or-the-alliance-of-losers/ https://www.filfre.net/2020/02/the-deal-of-the-century-or-th...
- protomyth 6y ago
  From Aaron Hillegass Cocoa® Programming for Mac® OS X, Third Edition Once upon a time, there was a company called Taligent, which was created by IBM and Apple to develop a set of tools and libraries like Cocoa. About the time Taligent reached the peak of its mindshare, I met one of its engineers at a trade show. I asked him to create a simple application for me: A window would appear with a button, and when the button was clicked, the words “Hello, World!” would appear in a text field. The engineer created a project and started subclassing madly: subclassing the window and the button and the event handler. Then he started generating code: dozens of lines to get the button and the text field onto the window. After 45 minutes, I had to leave. The app still did not work. That day, I knew that the company was doomed. A couple of years later, Taligent quietly closed its doors forever. It is asserted a bit later than C++ was the problem.
- sgerenser 6y ago
  Might be the video you were referring to: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/os-rust/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/os-rust/ Skip to 24:30 for the Taligent part.
  - chubot 6y ago
    Yes that's it, thanks!
dws 6y ago
The ones I'm thinking of were were in "boring" places like large power companies, and back-end systems for telecom. The stories we heard, which are hard to grok now but make sense if you think back to mid-90's hardware, where of multi-day build and test runs causing projects to grind to near halts. Fertile, but painful, soil for the idea of "Refactoring" to take root in.
gilbetron 6y ago
Not the OP, and I don't have any specific examples, but this was at the height of Waterfall (not in name, but in principle), where it was generally still taught as the way. Agile wasn't even a glimmer yet, but Extreme Programming was what Agile is now - interesting ideas, but mostly horribly executed. Plus OO was at it's height as well, and C++ was seen as being incapable of handling OO sophistication, but Smalltalk could! (spoiler: it couldn't either) Then Java came and took over, and while it is a great language, it turns out massive, sophisticated OO approaches just breed their own complexity and so it picked up the "bad" moniker (it isn't), and now we find ourselves in other waters with a lot better understanding of everything, but still with a long way to go!
microtherion 6y ago
C++ programming in the early 90s was, in retrospect, not all that much fun. templates were very underpowered and not widely implemented, the library was minimal. Everybody defined their own string and vector classes, or used products such as Rogue Wave Tools.h++, which at the time still offered macro-based container classes. There were a lot of fumbling exploration into what kind of OO design would prove long term workable, and in what existed of the C++ standard library at the time, some classes, like iostream with its multiple inheritance and virtual base classes, may not have given particularly sound examples to emulate. The arrival of the GoF design pattern book and of the STL were, in my opinion, massive game changers.

chubot 6y ago

I wasn't there, but apparently Taligent was a failed C++ operating system from Apple and IBM in the 90's. I think there is a talk on YouTube by Bryan Cantrill that gives some color on it... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent http://bobcongdon.net/blog/2004/06/the-taligent-effect/ http://bobcongdon.net/blog/2004/06/the-taligent-effect/

lou1306 6y ago
The Digital Antiquarian also touches on Taligent in his post about the IBM/Apple "alliance" in the 90s: https://www.filfre.net/2020/02/the-deal-of-the-century-or-the-alliance-of-losers/ https://www.filfre.net/2020/02/the-deal-of-the-century-or-th...
protomyth 6y ago
From Aaron Hillegass Cocoa® Programming for Mac® OS X, Third Edition Once upon a time, there was a company called Taligent, which was created by IBM and Apple to develop a set of tools and libraries like Cocoa. About the time Taligent reached the peak of its mindshare, I met one of its engineers at a trade show. I asked him to create a simple application for me: A window would appear with a button, and when the button was clicked, the words “Hello, World!” would appear in a text field. The engineer created a project and started subclassing madly: subclassing the window and the button and the event handler. Then he started generating code: dozens of lines to get the button and the text field onto the window. After 45 minutes, I had to leave. The app still did not work. That day, I knew that the company was doomed. A couple of years later, Taligent quietly closed its doors forever. It is asserted a bit later than C++ was the problem.
sgerenser 6y ago
Might be the video you were referring to: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/os-rust/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/os-rust/ Skip to 24:30 for the Taligent part.
- chubot 6y ago
  Yes that's it, thanks!

dws 6y ago

The ones I'm thinking of were were in "boring" places like large power companies, and back-end systems for telecom. The stories we heard, which are hard to grok now but make sense if you think back to mid-90's hardware, where of multi-day build and test runs causing projects to grind to near halts. Fertile, but painful, soil for the idea of "Refactoring" to take root in.

gilbetron 6y ago

Not the OP, and I don't have any specific examples, but this was at the height of Waterfall (not in name, but in principle), where it was generally still taught as the way. Agile wasn't even a glimmer yet, but Extreme Programming was what Agile is now - interesting ideas, but mostly horribly executed. Plus OO was at it's height as well, and C++ was seen as being incapable of handling OO sophistication, but Smalltalk could! (spoiler: it couldn't either) Then Java came and took over, and while it is a great language, it turns out massive, sophisticated OO approaches just breed their own complexity and so it picked up the "bad" moniker (it isn't), and now we find ourselves in other waters with a lot better understanding of everything, but still with a long way to go!

microtherion 6y ago

C++ programming in the early 90s was, in retrospect, not all that much fun. templates were very underpowered and not widely implemented, the library was minimal. Everybody defined their own string and vector classes, or used products such as Rogue Wave Tools.h++, which at the time still offered macro-based container classes. There were a lot of fumbling exploration into what kind of OO design would prove long term workable, and in what existed of the C++ standard library at the time, some classes, like iostream with its multiple inheritance and virtual base classes, may not have given particularly sound examples to emulate. The arrival of the GoF design pattern book and of the STL were, in my opinion, massive game changers.