Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

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in 01997 it was acceptable to them and that's why most of them did move to java, once hotspot came out if not earlier

c++ projects today are very different from c++ projects in the 01990s when basically all 'serious' software was either c++ or c

a lot of c++ projects in the 01990s were what we think of now as java projects or c# projects (or django projects): line-of-business systems full of boilerplate and shitty architecture, not streamlined mega-optimized aaa game engines or web browsers

c++ projects today are the niche that was left over, which is, yeah, basically the cases where you can't afford gc

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the appeal of wirth languages is that you get 90% of the value of a monstrosity like pl/i or c++ for about 5% of the complexity

language complexity hurts you three times: when you are learning the language, when you are choosing a compiler, and when you are debugging your code

so actually sometimes you get 200% of the value of a monstrosity like pl/i or c++

hopefully at some point someone will develop a wirthified version of rust, but i don't think wirth will do it this time

> c++ projects today are very different from c++ projects in the 01990s when basically all 'serious' software was either c++ or c

As an example, as late as '99, my first large web application was C++, and that was not an unusual choice at the time.

I worked on a greenfield web application in C++ last year. It still is a viable choice for web backend even today.

Depends on how much effort is done in security.

Most of the stuff I have exposed to the Internet written in C or C++, has done so by using a safer managed language and only accessing the native code via libraries.

Naturally there is the issue of on which language those runtimes were written on, but even so, the trusted computing base is much smaller than having the application fully written in C++, with possible C idioms while parsing data coming out of the network.

My own reason for preferring lightweight languages like Python over C++ for web services is not security but flexibility: it takes more code to do things in C++, and it takes more work to debug that code when the program is small. The things you get in exchange (mostly performance, since callability from an FFI is not a consideration) are often not worth it. Most web services I've worked on have a much harder time meeting the demands on their flexibility than those on their performance.

>in 01997 it was acceptable to them >c++ projects today are very different from c++ projects in the 01990s >a lot of c++ projects in the 01990s

You got the year wrong with that '0' prefix. The decade you're referring to is the 11990s.

This might be the finest criticism I've seen of attempts to extend the Christian epoch forward or backwards.

For those that don't know, my comment is based on the Holocene Era calendar, aka Human era calendar (HE). Basically, human civilization started roughly 12k years ago, in ~-10000BCE. The HE calendar lets us express all human-era events using positive numbers, and does so in a way that just tacks a '1' onto the popular Gregorian calendar so it's very easy to convert.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an...

Good luck getting people to agree on anything.

Maybe we could start the epoch from when Homo erectus invented fire two million years ago and align with the Christian era for convenience.

So this is now the year 2,002,023 FE (Fire Era).

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