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> - There is no pride in managing or understanding complexity > Complexity exists, you can't make it go away, managing it and understanding it is the only thin

> - There is no pride in managing or understanding complexity > Complexity exists, you can't make it go away, managing it and understanding it is the only thing you can do. Simple systems only displace complexity. I interpreted that one as a suggestion to avoid welcoming needless complexity because of the false sense of pride it gives you to successfully manage that complexity. To give an example, I believe C++'s enduring popularity is mostly because of exactly this false sense of pride. You practically need a doctorate-level understanding of the language to use most of its features without stepping on the dozen landmines the language places in your way (I'm so smart because I: remembered to declare my destructors virtual and understand why; can interpret this 2MB of template errors in the compiler output; can """cleverly""" use operator overloads). It can feel nice to be a master of such a complex tool, but that's a false sense of pride. The complexity of your tooling is not the point; the end product is.

GuB-42 2y ago
C++ complexity exists for a reason. It does a lot of things and these things are useful, if not necessary for those who use it. I can't think of any language that can replace C++ completely. Plenty can replace C++ incompletely, but then you would need another language for the leftovers, that's displacing complexity. There are modern languages trying to eat C++ lunch, like Zig and Rust, but you don't get decades of backward compatibility, and they are not particularly simple either. Rust in particular is one of the most complex programming language in use today, it could definitely be simplified by removing the borrow checker and lifetime things and make "unsafe" implicit, leave memory safety to the programmer. But it makes no sense because Rust was designed for memory safety and performance, which is a complex problem, and therefore Rust is complex.
- stickfigure 2y ago
  > C++ complexity exists for a reason. Yeah, because Bjarne was figuring it out as he went. Which is fair, he was treading new ground. But C++ would have turned out a lot better if he'd taken a lot more vacation time.
- DeepSeaTortoise 2y ago
  IMO Rust is hard until you gain some intuition, then it becomes MUCH easier. The real frustrating part is claiming to embrace errors by returns, but then still just panicing all over the place, dependencies piled upon dependencies piled upon dependencies, just about 0 documentation on doing anything asynchronous without external dependencies, important features being kept in unstable for basically ever, one of the highest barriers to contribute to language features, highly questionable leadership processes and the worst of all: Openly embracing design complexity. When I learned about extension traits for the first time, I thought "That's awesome", only to find not much later crates, that seem to have some features, which I couldn't find the implementation for anywhere. Turns out external crates were pulled in, which then were used to extend anything carrying certain marker-traits from the previous crate. Like WHY?
compiler-guy 2y ago
C++'s enduring popularity is mostly inertia from the time it was if not the only game in town, the biggest, baddest game in town, and from being the souped-up (if overly complex) successor to the previous biggest, baddest game in town. Thousands of companies collectively have billions of lines of code in C++. Millions of programmers know it well enough to get the job done. Entire ecosystems with absolutely huge areas are well defined by C++ (and previously C). Rewriting all this code would be a gargantuan task. It all mostly works (yes, it has bugs, lots of them, but it is still mostly doing the job). The "R" in "ROI" for rewriting it is extremely low and hard to predict, and the "I" is very high. And that is why old programming languages live on. Not because people take pride in being geniuses or the ability to code in it, but because inertia is really hard to change.
xedrac 2y ago
Yes, C++ developers seem particularly prone to adding unnecessary complexity. I'm not sure why that is, but they feel compelled to only program the most generic, ultra flexible solutions, even though it'll likely only every get used in fairly simple ways. But you forever have to pay the cost of that complexity for virtually zero benefit.

GuB-42 2y ago

C++ complexity exists for a reason. It does a lot of things and these things are useful, if not necessary for those who use it. I can't think of any language that can replace C++ completely. Plenty can replace C++ incompletely, but then you would need another language for the leftovers, that's displacing complexity. There are modern languages trying to eat C++ lunch, like Zig and Rust, but you don't get decades of backward compatibility, and they are not particularly simple either. Rust in particular is one of the most complex programming language in use today, it could definitely be simplified by removing the borrow checker and lifetime things and make "unsafe" implicit, leave memory safety to the programmer. But it makes no sense because Rust was designed for memory safety and performance, which is a complex problem, and therefore Rust is complex.

stickfigure 2y ago
> C++ complexity exists for a reason. Yeah, because Bjarne was figuring it out as he went. Which is fair, he was treading new ground. But C++ would have turned out a lot better if he'd taken a lot more vacation time.
DeepSeaTortoise 2y ago
IMO Rust is hard until you gain some intuition, then it becomes MUCH easier. The real frustrating part is claiming to embrace errors by returns, but then still just panicing all over the place, dependencies piled upon dependencies piled upon dependencies, just about 0 documentation on doing anything asynchronous without external dependencies, important features being kept in unstable for basically ever, one of the highest barriers to contribute to language features, highly questionable leadership processes and the worst of all: Openly embracing design complexity. When I learned about extension traits for the first time, I thought "That's awesome", only to find not much later crates, that seem to have some features, which I couldn't find the implementation for anywhere. Turns out external crates were pulled in, which then were used to extend anything carrying certain marker-traits from the previous crate. Like WHY?

compiler-guy 2y ago

C++'s enduring popularity is mostly inertia from the time it was if not the only game in town, the biggest, baddest game in town, and from being the souped-up (if overly complex) successor to the previous biggest, baddest game in town. Thousands of companies collectively have billions of lines of code in C++. Millions of programmers know it well enough to get the job done. Entire ecosystems with absolutely huge areas are well defined by C++ (and previously C). Rewriting all this code would be a gargantuan task. It all mostly works (yes, it has bugs, lots of them, but it is still mostly doing the job). The "R" in "ROI" for rewriting it is extremely low and hard to predict, and the "I" is very high. And that is why old programming languages live on. Not because people take pride in being geniuses or the ability to code in it, but because inertia is really hard to change.

xedrac 2y ago

Yes, C++ developers seem particularly prone to adding unnecessary complexity. I'm not sure why that is, but they feel compelled to only program the most generic, ultra flexible solutions, even though it'll likely only every get used in fairly simple ways. But you forever have to pay the cost of that complexity for virtually zero benefit.