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This is excellent. FWIW I bought and read "C++ Crash Course" by Lospinso. I found that tremendously helpful with his approach of "assuming you really know C [I

This is excellent. FWIW I bought and read "C++ Crash Course" by Lospinso. I found that tremendously helpful with his approach of "assuming you really know C [I do], here is C++" and can easily recommend his book for anyone on this path. That said, I like your ordering too. The other confounding factor is that I have also written a lot of Java code (both during the development of the language and afterward for my column in Javaworld) which I really enjoyed, but it too "fixes" some things which James disliked about C++ (and as a long time C programmer I understood quite well). As a learning experience, this journey has been confounding, enlightening, and painful in equal measures :-)

ncmncm 6y ago
People who come to C++ from Java frequently bring with them Java Disease. If you find yourself reaching for std::shared_ptr and virtual functions more often than once in a blue moon, you are suffering from Java Disease, and are writing bad code. Anything that seems to be something Java "fixed" is a thing they failed to understand. You will have to unlearn those, along with myriad bad C habits, many of which you don't know you have. It takes sharp observation to catch them.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  Okay, if somewhat harsh :-). As someone with north of 15 programming languages that I consider myself "fluent" in, albeit some latency involved in ones I've not used for a while, I always look for the idiomatic expression of computation. It is the difference between "writing FORTRAN in <x>, and writing an algorithm in <x>." One of main the reasons I posted the question is that I found that design patterns I expected to be there, were not there, or were not idiomatic, and for whatever reason I am reasonably good at figuring out when something is "not quite right." That said, I think it is unfair to characterize the choices of any language designer as either ignorant or wrong. As someone who participated in the design of Java I can assure you that the team "understood" why C++ did what it did. During that development, if there was any confusion, Guy Steele, whose office was three down from mine, would eloquently explain it so that everyone could understand it. That is not to say there weren't different opinions about "better" ways and "worse" ways to do things, Bill Joy was never a big fan of the Java choices and often took the opposing view across from Gosling. The language that Bill was designing was called 'Self' and it embodied his design choices, just as Java embodied Jame's design choices. Me, as a systems guy, could really care less if Boolean was a first class type or just a uint1. I just want to write code that works.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    I can assure you that anybody who makes members virtual by default does not understand the feature, even if that body is named Steele. What was much worse was copying in wholesale the C crap that C++ had been obliged to adopt to maintain backward compatibility with C, when Java faced no such constraint.
    - ChuckMcM 6y ago
      I appreciate that you are consistent. Have you considered self ? https://selflanguage.org/ https://selflanguage.org/
      - ncmncm 6y ago
        I visited Craig Chambers at Stanford in the 80s... I never heard of Bill Joy having anything to do with Self.
        ChuckMcM 6y ago
        Cool, from the self web page -- "The project continued at Sun Microsystems Laboratories until 1995, where it benefited from the efforts of Randall B. Smith, Mario Wolczko, John Maloney, and Lars Bak." Java was released in March of 1995, about 1/3 of the original Java group left after the 1.0 release (not in a small part because of Sun's attitude). I made the mistake when I went to work at Google of disparaging Self (which Urs Hoezle had worked on and was my boss's boss, oops!) But much of the original Java team had ended up there so it was kind of a fun to catch up. So when you visited Craig at Stanford did you get along with him?
        ncmncm 6y ago
        Seems like 30 years ago. (Because it was?) He was busy, I was an interruption. But he was gracious abt it. I recall I was a lot more interested in tail-call elimination, at the time, than he was. Self was seminal in two ways: prototypes instead of classes influenced Javascript, and code splitting presaged perhaps the most important JIT technique. We might have been better off today if Eich had just picked up Self instead of throwing together Javascript. But honestly I don't know either well enough to say.
- gautamdivgi 6y ago
  As a sibling comment mentioned - somewhat harsh. I can relate to it. I've seen c++ code where they created an entire class hierarchy from "Object".
  - carlhjerpe 6y ago
    Well this is what Qt does as far as my understanding goes. If you write Qt applications everything to be used in Qt must derive from QObject. I wouldn't call Qt bad because of that. Sure there's overhead with the vtables but that isn't a problem for everyone.
    - ncmncm 6y ago
      Qt was first released when C++ had no more organizational features than Java, so it gets a free pass. QObject is not Qt's greatest sin. That would be its lower-case macros: "slots" etc. There can be no excuse for that. Even C coders knew better, even back then.
    - majewsky 6y ago
      QObject is not a base class for everything like in those codebases GP probably thinks about. It's a base class for a very specific set of functionality that can be very roughly summarized as "the thing wants to participate in the signal-slot communication scheme". For example, QFile is a QObject because it has ready-to-read signals etc. But there are also tons of classes in Qt that are not QObject, esp. all the value classes like QList or QPoint or QString. If anything, the biggest sin of QObject might be its name. If it had been named QActor or something like that, people wouldn't mind that much.

ncmncm 6y ago

People who come to C++ from Java frequently bring with them Java Disease. If you find yourself reaching for std::shared_ptr and virtual functions more often than once in a blue moon, you are suffering from Java Disease, and are writing bad code. Anything that seems to be something Java "fixed" is a thing they failed to understand. You will have to unlearn those, along with myriad bad C habits, many of which you don't know you have. It takes sharp observation to catch them.

ChuckMcM 6y ago
Okay, if somewhat harsh :-). As someone with north of 15 programming languages that I consider myself "fluent" in, albeit some latency involved in ones I've not used for a while, I always look for the idiomatic expression of computation. It is the difference between "writing FORTRAN in <x>, and writing an algorithm in <x>." One of main the reasons I posted the question is that I found that design patterns I expected to be there, were not there, or were not idiomatic, and for whatever reason I am reasonably good at figuring out when something is "not quite right." That said, I think it is unfair to characterize the choices of any language designer as either ignorant or wrong. As someone who participated in the design of Java I can assure you that the team "understood" why C++ did what it did. During that development, if there was any confusion, Guy Steele, whose office was three down from mine, would eloquently explain it so that everyone could understand it. That is not to say there weren't different opinions about "better" ways and "worse" ways to do things, Bill Joy was never a big fan of the Java choices and often took the opposing view across from Gosling. The language that Bill was designing was called 'Self' and it embodied his design choices, just as Java embodied Jame's design choices. Me, as a systems guy, could really care less if Boolean was a first class type or just a uint1. I just want to write code that works.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  I can assure you that anybody who makes members virtual by default does not understand the feature, even if that body is named Steele. What was much worse was copying in wholesale the C crap that C++ had been obliged to adopt to maintain backward compatibility with C, when Java faced no such constraint.
  - ChuckMcM 6y ago
    I appreciate that you are consistent. Have you considered self ? https://selflanguage.org/ https://selflanguage.org/
    - ncmncm 6y ago
      I visited Craig Chambers at Stanford in the 80s... I never heard of Bill Joy having anything to do with Self.
      - ChuckMcM 6y ago
        Cool, from the self web page -- "The project continued at Sun Microsystems Laboratories until 1995, where it benefited from the efforts of Randall B. Smith, Mario Wolczko, John Maloney, and Lars Bak." Java was released in March of 1995, about 1/3 of the original Java group left after the 1.0 release (not in a small part because of Sun's attitude). I made the mistake when I went to work at Google of disparaging Self (which Urs Hoezle had worked on and was my boss's boss, oops!) But much of the original Java team had ended up there so it was kind of a fun to catch up. So when you visited Craig at Stanford did you get along with him?
        ncmncm 6y ago
        Seems like 30 years ago. (Because it was?) He was busy, I was an interruption. But he was gracious abt it. I recall I was a lot more interested in tail-call elimination, at the time, than he was. Self was seminal in two ways: prototypes instead of classes influenced Javascript, and code splitting presaged perhaps the most important JIT technique. We might have been better off today if Eich had just picked up Self instead of throwing together Javascript. But honestly I don't know either well enough to say.
gautamdivgi 6y ago
As a sibling comment mentioned - somewhat harsh. I can relate to it. I've seen c++ code where they created an entire class hierarchy from "Object".
- carlhjerpe 6y ago
  Well this is what Qt does as far as my understanding goes. If you write Qt applications everything to be used in Qt must derive from QObject. I wouldn't call Qt bad because of that. Sure there's overhead with the vtables but that isn't a problem for everyone.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    Qt was first released when C++ had no more organizational features than Java, so it gets a free pass. QObject is not Qt's greatest sin. That would be its lower-case macros: "slots" etc. There can be no excuse for that. Even C coders knew better, even back then.
  - majewsky 6y ago
    QObject is not a base class for everything like in those codebases GP probably thinks about. It's a base class for a very specific set of functionality that can be very roughly summarized as "the thing wants to participate in the signal-slot communication scheme". For example, QFile is a QObject because it has ready-to-read signals etc. But there are also tons of classes in Qt that are not QObject, esp. all the value classes like QList or QPoint or QString. If anything, the biggest sin of QObject might be its name. If it had been named QActor or something like that, people wouldn't mind that much.