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Comment by duped | Hacker News Reader

C++ is the poster child of cruft and slow moving development, so it doesn't seem that these properties are correlated.

Yeah at first blush. Then you look at when C++ was new and being standardized it was moving pretty damn fast compared to anything else. They had a whole catchphrase "Remember the Vasa!" In an attempt to justify curbing enthusiasm for at least some of the many and disperate proposals.

Now, despite the big changes of C++11 as the watershed it has slowed and is doing better for it. Correlated? Maybe. Good taste should also slow the rate of change of "What do I have to deal with as a programmer in this language?" Also if the original language design that people found good enough to use was done really well then it shouldn't need too much change on top of it?

Point taken, you can use C++ as an example for anything. Even opposing points. It really has it all! (Like it or not)

Compared to C, C++ isn't that slow moving.

Not many languages take C's ultra-high-inertia approach. Perhaps Scheme and Forth.

Ada, 4 standards in 4 decades (1983, 1987, 1995, 2012).

Most people using it will probably also claim it is a feature rather than a handicap.

Reminder that Ada already had modules (Packages) almost a decade ago.

The frequency of the updates are only part of the story though. C had C89, C99, C11, C17. C++ had C++98, C++03, C++11, C++14, C++17, C++20. C++ is updated more often, but it also makes more significant changes in each version than C does.

I don't know Ada as well as I know C and C++, but I believe Ada lands somewhere between C and C++ in terms of how fast-moving it is. Makes sense that Ada is pretty slow moving, given its purpose.

> slow-moving development

> too much feature churn

Pick one, please.

you can have both if you hire more developers on the project.

The OP said "cruft" not "too much feature churn". Very different things.

Can you point to the comment you quoted the "too much feature churn" from?

High-latency but high-bandwidth. C++ features take forever to land, but there's always something big in the pipeline, for better or worse.

C++ moves at lightspeed compared to Fortran, which might get some kind of templates around 2030.

C++20 added modules to the language more than 3 decades after Fortran had it already in the language.

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