On Jan 28, 2009, at 3:19 PM, al davis wrote:
>> And again, I agree in theory, but in practice things are
>> quite a bit different. A lot of people writing C++ code
>> these days have no idea what they're doing, and the rest of
>> us pay the price in frustration when we try to get something
>> compiled.
>
> A lot of people writing code in any language have no idea what
> they are doing.
Too true.
>> So, I guess my problem is more with clueless C++
>> "programmers" than C++ itself.
>
> Substitute any other language, that statement is still equally
> true.
True, but not "equally" true. There are lots of clueless
programmers coding in C++ and Java because those are the languages
that the "programmer mill" colleges are "teaching" these days. That
doesn't make the languages bad. I really don't see too many people
coding in, say, Lisp or assembler who aren't good programmers. I'm
sure you see my point.
I still think C++ is syntactically ugly (see below), but that's
just my aesthetic opinion.
So, can you honestly say that if you were to download, say, ten
packages written in C and ten packages written in C++, you'd have as
many compilation problems with each? Having likely built as much
software as you have, I can loudly say nothing could be further from
the truth. I fought with it yet again just yesterday.
That's not to say that DJ, Dan, and Ben are (or would be) bad C++
programmers. In fact, I'm quite certain that the exact opposite
would be true. But being an open-source project, if it gets
rewritten in C++, DJ/Dan/Ben's excellent C++ code would run the risk
of becoming polluted by C++ code written by "programmer mill" idiots
who don't know what they're doing.
It's an unfortunate line of thought, but we've all seen it happen
before, and I like these tools a lot and want to continue to use them.
>> (though I do consider C++ to
>> be a horribly ugly pile of crap)
>
> Most of the ugliness is inherited from C, or exists because of
> the restrictions that come from a goal of making it a proper
> superset of C.
No, the ugliness to which I am referring is the horrible syntax
that C++ stapled on top of C. Stroustrup was smoking something very
strange when he came up with that. If there were more characters in
the ASCII character set, that guy would have come up with more
features to tie them to. C's syntax is terse enough as it is, but at
least it's a simple language, unlike C++.
> Can you do better? Show me.
> I don't mean a theoretically better simple language. I mean
> something better for the type of jobs C++ was designed for.
Oh good heavens.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
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