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Comment by sjm-lbm | Hacker News Reader

They also started, if I'm doing my arithmetic right, in 1996. Honestly, I could see C++ having been their best choice back then. Every language I would rather do a large project in is either newer than that or would have been pretty immature for a large project in the mid-90s.

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There were a number of alternatives back then; and if you wanted OO, Smalltalk was still strong in corporate circles I believe.

I was programming back in '96 (recreationally and as a student, not professionally) and C++ would not have seemed like a good choice even then.

C++ was pretty immature for a large project in 1996. It was first standardized in 1998.

It was already in wide use long before then. Microsoft's MFC was first released in 1992, and that was the Windows desktop library for years.

Java was still new and slow. There were some interesting RAD tools, but those weren't particularly well suited to 'large' projects.

I worked on a mega-LoC (millions of lines of code) C++ project in the late 90s. It wasn't even (to the extent I could honestly tell at that point in my career, anyway) a particularly hellish codebase or design, and suffered none of the madnesses described in The Fine Article.

(Of course, we were sub-sub-contractors working only on designated parts of the application. The stuff I did touch was consistently sane enough, though, that I don't think I'm too out of place in positing a legit minimal degree of not-terribleness across the rest of the project.)

I sat through too many 3 hour cfront compiles.

My first job involved a 6 hour compile caused by that someone desperately had tried to beat a braindead homemade interpreted language into submission using a c preprocessor stage. Function calls where largely macro expansions...

All errors was reported as : syntax error on line 1. Fun times.

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