Comment by oldcynic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oldcynic | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I would say "it depends".

Just as poor programmers came later from Visual Basic, or MSVC++ (somehow we went through a phase were everyone coming for interview with MSVC++ actually had C with classes, and for a while it was a warning sign and standing joke at the place I then worked). Getting people who claimed C++ who actually knew it was pretty challenging around the millennium.

In the 80s just about everyone who had an 8 bit started with BASIC, and an awful lot of them managed to go on to be perfectly acceptable programmers when they moved on to C, C++, assembler, and more recent languages, or even turned out a decent game in something like Blitz Basic on the Amiga. Then again there were some who couldn't move beyond BASIC, because it was simple enough almost everyone could piece something together with it - so even back then it was a warning like PHP can be today.

It's not age, and it's not BASIC - there's plenty of younger folks turning out abysmal code who've never been near it.

I wonder how I'd have turned out if I'd learnt C from one of this guy's books instead of K&R and having a couple of experts handy.

Might be totally wrong, but it's possible that MSVC++ programmers typically knowing 'C with classes' might come from the gaming world, as that's a fairly accurate description of some very popular game engines (Valve's Source engine[1] being the one I'm most familiar with, where e.g. std::string is unused in favor of char/wchar arrays).

[1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013 (originally released in 2004)

It is a bit more complicated than that.

C wasn't much used in MS-DOS, as it was yet another systems language trying to gain the place of Assembly for high performance applications.

In some countries Pascal dialects (mostly TP compatible), Modula-2 reigned, while in others C and C++ were other contenders.

By the time Windows (written in C) became mature enough people started caring about it (3.x), C++ was already having its place via OWL (later VCL) on the Borland side, and Microsoft eventually came up with MFC.

However these were the days when C++ still didn't had a standard (which came in 1998), beyond the C++ARM book, so either you would stick with the compiler framework, or try to minimize language features for better portability.

Additionally on Windows everyone was learning it via Petzold's book, where he takes the approach C compiled with C++, not even "C with Classes".

Also although OWL and VCL were great OOP libraries with nice abstractions, MFC was pretty much a Win32 thin wrapper as its initial internal implementation (AFX) wasn't well received by internal MS employees as not being low level enough over Win32.

So there were lots of issues going on that lead to such cases.

Interesting, thanks, that clears up some of mystery from the Windows side of things. Explains why so many came in who clearly had experience, but were missing most of the ++ part.

Course back then STL (mostly now the standard library) was still sgi STL, and there was also RogueWave, both still fairly new and on the up.

Oh God, Petzold's book. What a piece of trash that was. The code, while not incorrect like the one in the article, was fairly atrocious, and the various UI things he did were unforgivable, if only because it encouraged legions of programmers to completely disregard any human interface principles. If I could erase one CS book from history, that might be the one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com