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Somehow I got hold of a link to Yossi Kreinin's 'Frequently Questioned Answers' (http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/index.html http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/index.html) - prob

by saw-lau 16y ago

Somehow I got hold of a link to Yossi Kreinin's 'Frequently Questioned Answers' (http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/index.html http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/index.html) - probably from HN, actually; so I felt duty-bound to add it to SO's C++ Tag Info (http://stackoverflow.com/tags/c%2b%2b/info http://stackoverflow.com/tags/c%2b%2b/info; awaiting moderation). (From a former C++ lover who is now much more comfortable programming in C again...)

blub 16y ago
I have read this FQA when it first appeared and I didn't find anything noteworthy in it (except the author's bias and visceral hate). This is empirical (HN, reddit), but I've noticed that people who recommend the FQA usually have a poor understanding of C++.
- saw-lau 16y ago
  While I don't claim to be an expert (I haven't used C++ for the last six or so years, and I only have about five or six years experience in using it), I'd like to think I have better than a 'poor' understanding of it. Interestingly for me, when I read the FQA last week for the first time, I didn't find anything noteworthy in it either. It basically resonated with me as more of a series of well-argued (IMHO) 'things that I always knew but had never really attempted to explain' statements. The author is, of course, biased towards not promoting the language; and I guess I've gone down that road, too.
- danieldk 16y ago
  I have read comp.lang.c++(.moderated) for years, and I have never seen a language where the most experienced programmers have to read up the standard to answer a question. Many points raised in the FQA are valid (although written in an inflammatory manner), the main point being that C++ is full of corner cases, traps, and historical artifacts. IMO C++ is a language that we just have to live with. It's ugly, but there's lots of legacy software written in C++, and the only viable option if you need to optimize a lot while still keeping proper typing.
- haberman 16y ago
  I like C++, but one valuable thing I took from FQA was a concrete example of how absurdly difficult C++ is to parse. Everyone "knows" how hard it is to parse C++, but this specific example was really eye-opening to me: it's a program which can have two completely different parse trees depending on the result of a sizeof() expression! http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/web-vs-c++.html#misfeature-3 http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/web-vs-c++.html#misfeature-3

by saw-lau 16y ago

blub 16y ago

I have read this FQA when it first appeared and I didn't find anything noteworthy in it (except the author's bias and visceral hate). This is empirical (HN, reddit), but I've noticed that people who recommend the FQA usually have a poor understanding of C++.

saw-lau 16y ago
While I don't claim to be an expert (I haven't used C++ for the last six or so years, and I only have about five or six years experience in using it), I'd like to think I have better than a 'poor' understanding of it. Interestingly for me, when I read the FQA last week for the first time, I didn't find anything noteworthy in it either. It basically resonated with me as more of a series of well-argued (IMHO) 'things that I always knew but had never really attempted to explain' statements. The author is, of course, biased towards not promoting the language; and I guess I've gone down that road, too.
danieldk 16y ago
I have read comp.lang.c++(.moderated) for years, and I have never seen a language where the most experienced programmers have to read up the standard to answer a question. Many points raised in the FQA are valid (although written in an inflammatory manner), the main point being that C++ is full of corner cases, traps, and historical artifacts. IMO C++ is a language that we just have to live with. It's ugly, but there's lots of legacy software written in C++, and the only viable option if you need to optimize a lot while still keeping proper typing.
haberman 16y ago
I like C++, but one valuable thing I took from FQA was a concrete example of how absurdly difficult C++ is to parse. Everyone "knows" how hard it is to parse C++, but this specific example was really eye-opening to me: it's a program which can have two completely different parse trees depending on the result of a sizeof() expression! http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/web-vs-c++.html#misfeature-3 http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/web-vs-c++.html#misfeature-3