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>and remove everything else. That is not a good idea. Breaking backwards compatibility with a language that large is going to damage the ecosystem. the Python

>and remove everything else. That is not a good idea. Breaking backwards compatibility with a language that large is going to damage the ecosystem. the Python 2 -> 3 transition shows how slow and costly, ironically enough, this can be. Stroustrup is correct when he says the way forward is evolutionary. In evolution you never cut things, they're always phased out. Vestigial structures stick around. Incremental change is ultimately going to be more successful, causing schisms and splitting the language community is not going to be success.

lelanthran 3y ago
> Stroustrup is correct when he says the way forward is evolutionary. In evolution you never cut things, they're always phased out. Vestigial structures stick around. That hasn't worked in the past for C++. Why would you expect that approach to start working in the future? I also think that it's a bad idea to have the language's direction set by what the existing (and attritioning) developers want, and not by what it would take to get new devs. A policy like that is almost guaranteed to result in death by attrition. > Incremental change is ultimately going to be more successful, causing schisms and splitting the language community is not going to be success. Two things: 1. I think we're defining success differently here. I'm defining it as market-share.[1] 2. You're looking at the way C++ has always done things, which has failed (IMO, anyway) to keep the language mainstream. You're predicting a future where this approach that has failed in the past, will succeed in your predictions. BTW, I'm not predicting anything; I'm saying that the C++ approach has resulted in a dismal failure for the languages popularity, causing it to lose some ground against every single competitor in that space: Rust, Nim, Zig and more are all eating away at what's left of the C++ developer base after Java and C# took a shark-sized bite from it in the early 00's to late 00's. All that's left for C++ is gamedev. If we want to avoid that, C++ needs to be more accessible. In order to get to that, it needs to remove anything that can be removed. [1] Python is an incredible success, having gained marketshare since 3 was released and people started the "slow and costly" migration which only took 10 years for Python 3 to be the most-used language now. C++, by comparison, has been losing marketshare with each new evolutionary and incremental change that never discards anything. C++ has been doing what you say is the correct way, and it has been losing its status as a mainstream language with each new standard. Python did it the way you say is incorrect, and is still solid in it's use-case against newer and better languages.
- Barrin92 3y ago
  >All that's left for C++ is gamedev Okay we gotta agree on some baseline reality. C++ is everywhere. Google and Facebook probably work on more active C++ code than there is Rust, Nim and Zig code multiplied by 100 in the entire world. Most machines, web browsers, airplanes, routers, databases, all machine learning libraries, toasters and tanks run on C++. There's about 30x more open C++ jobs than for all other system languages combined. >C++, by comparison, has been losing marketshare That's not true either. As flawed as I personally find these indices, C++ has been, quite rapidly , gaining marketshare over the last few years. https://www.infoworld.com/article/3684848/c-plus-plus-wins-programming-language-of-the-year-award.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3684848/c-plus-plus-wins-p...
  - kibwen 3y ago
    The parent commenter is underestimating the usage of C++, but using TIOBE as an argument serves no purpose, and I wish people would let it die. Their methodology is incoherent, their grasp of statistics is questionable, their information sources are nonsensical and inconsistent, and their weightings are capricious, opaque, and ever-changing. And now consider that their "language of the year" exhibits all of these flaws and more; it's often the case that the language of the year is simply the language that lost the most share at a specific point in the previous year (which happens all the time for no reason at all, because, as mentioned, they have no idea what they're doing). Please do not cite TIOBE in any context.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  While I agree with most of the theme regarding losing market share, C++ isn't going away while HPC/HFT still depends on it, we keep using languages that aren't self bootstrapted and rely on LLVM/GCC for their toolchains, JIT runtimes written in C++, GPGPU programming infrastructure, OS device drivers like on iDevices/Android/ChromeOS/Windows,certified compilers for high integrity computing,... Even if C++ loses everything else, it is still a big chunck of the industry to keep it going for decades to come.
  - tobias12345 3y ago
tobias12345 3y ago
C++ did a lot to improve safety over the decades, but it seems to have ended up in a local maximum. I doubt you can break out of that local maximum by doing all the things you did before. Something needs to change, backward compatibility would be the one thing with the biggest overall benefit -- but also with the biggest cost.

lelanthran 3y ago

> Stroustrup is correct when he says the way forward is evolutionary. In evolution you never cut things, they're always phased out. Vestigial structures stick around. That hasn't worked in the past for C++. Why would you expect that approach to start working in the future? I also think that it's a bad idea to have the language's direction set by what the existing (and attritioning) developers want, and not by what it would take to get new devs. A policy like that is almost guaranteed to result in death by attrition. > Incremental change is ultimately going to be more successful, causing schisms and splitting the language community is not going to be success. Two things: 1. I think we're defining success differently here. I'm defining it as market-share.[1] 2. You're looking at the way C++ has always done things, which has failed (IMO, anyway) to keep the language mainstream. You're predicting a future where this approach that has failed in the past, will succeed in your predictions. BTW, I'm not predicting anything; I'm saying that the C++ approach has resulted in a dismal failure for the languages popularity, causing it to lose some ground against every single competitor in that space: Rust, Nim, Zig and more are all eating away at what's left of the C++ developer base after Java and C# took a shark-sized bite from it in the early 00's to late 00's. All that's left for C++ is gamedev. If we want to avoid that, C++ needs to be more accessible. In order to get to that, it needs to remove anything that can be removed. [1] Python is an incredible success, having gained marketshare since 3 was released and people started the "slow and costly" migration which only took 10 years for Python 3 to be the most-used language now. C++, by comparison, has been losing marketshare with each new evolutionary and incremental change that never discards anything. C++ has been doing what you say is the correct way, and it has been losing its status as a mainstream language with each new standard. Python did it the way you say is incorrect, and is still solid in it's use-case against newer and better languages.

Barrin92 3y ago
>All that's left for C++ is gamedev Okay we gotta agree on some baseline reality. C++ is everywhere. Google and Facebook probably work on more active C++ code than there is Rust, Nim and Zig code multiplied by 100 in the entire world. Most machines, web browsers, airplanes, routers, databases, all machine learning libraries, toasters and tanks run on C++. There's about 30x more open C++ jobs than for all other system languages combined. >C++, by comparison, has been losing marketshare That's not true either. As flawed as I personally find these indices, C++ has been, quite rapidly , gaining marketshare over the last few years. https://www.infoworld.com/article/3684848/c-plus-plus-wins-programming-language-of-the-year-award.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3684848/c-plus-plus-wins-p...
- kibwen 3y ago
  The parent commenter is underestimating the usage of C++, but using TIOBE as an argument serves no purpose, and I wish people would let it die. Their methodology is incoherent, their grasp of statistics is questionable, their information sources are nonsensical and inconsistent, and their weightings are capricious, opaque, and ever-changing. And now consider that their "language of the year" exhibits all of these flaws and more; it's often the case that the language of the year is simply the language that lost the most share at a specific point in the previous year (which happens all the time for no reason at all, because, as mentioned, they have no idea what they're doing). Please do not cite TIOBE in any context.
pjmlp 3y ago
While I agree with most of the theme regarding losing market share, C++ isn't going away while HPC/HFT still depends on it, we keep using languages that aren't self bootstrapted and rely on LLVM/GCC for their toolchains, JIT runtimes written in C++, GPGPU programming infrastructure, OS device drivers like on iDevices/Android/ChromeOS/Windows,certified compilers for high integrity computing,... Even if C++ loses everything else, it is still a big chunck of the industry to keep it going for decades to come.
- tobias12345 3y ago

tobias12345 3y ago

C++ did a lot to improve safety over the decades, but it seems to have ended up in a local maximum. I doubt you can break out of that local maximum by doing all the things you did before. Something needs to change, backward compatibility would be the one thing with the biggest overall benefit -- but also with the biggest cost.