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I've never seen this quote before, but I've been using C++ as my main language since the early 90s and this matches my opinion of it EXACTLY. C++ is a design-b
by eps 5y ago
I've never seen this quote before, but I've been using C++ as my main language since the early 90s and this matches my opinion of it EXACTLY.
C++ is a design-by-committee mish-mash language chokeful of everything that was ever thrown at it without any regard to how well it all fits together. In practice it is indeed used in a form of restricted feature subsets, because there's basically no other way to use it. It gets the job done, but it's an ugly bloated monstrosity. Not bad, just ugly.
- rramadass 5y agoThe book Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming talks about designing a Multi-Paradigm (i.e. different Computation Models) language named Mozart/Oz where the different Concepts/Features are somewhat orthogonal to each other but still exist within a overall comprehensive system. You use what best fits the Problem Domain. Unfortunately Mozart/Oz has not taken off in the Industry but C++ has fulfilled the niche though not as cleanly as envisioned in that book. Paradoxically, the breadth of the language features has become its strength. You can do Imperative/Object-Oriented/Generic/Functional/Concurrent programming all within the same language and using the same toolchains. Moreover, all these higher-level concepts do not prevent you from getting close to the metal if needed. AFAIK, no other "industrial" language even comes close. Alexander Stepanov, the inventor of STL is on record stating that he could realize his vision of a comprehensive, generic, flexible, efficient Algorithms library only in C++ (his attempts using Ada and Scheme both failed). That should tell you something about the power of the language.