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Comment by nickpeterson | Hacker News Reader

I seem to remember something about the original designer leaving Apple and a bit of bad blood but I might be misremembering.

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You are probably thinking of this by Chris Lattner: https://forums.swift.org/t/core-team-to-form-language-workgr... (on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30416070) Swift has always been developed by a team of course, but he was the lead and probably the most public face.

Swift is pretty clearly Lattner's baby. It's not usual for language parents to just stick around indefinitely, Bjarne Stroustrup's helicopter parenting of C++ is the exception not the rule. You won't find Kernighan at WG14 meetings, Eich isn't a key member of TC39, Hoare isn't in Rust's core team. van Rossum was BDFL for over 20 years, but did give it up.

I am reminded of the Black Mirror episode "Arkangel". Children are their own people, they're meant to go into the world and be themselves. A programming language isn't a person but its destiny is distinct from yours, and it deserves the opportunity to be its own thing and develop without you hovering over it constantly.

Did you just use analogy to childrearing as way to shame creators who bring in collaborators but then don't fuck off fast enough?

That's some A-tier manipulation tactics.

Mostly I was just snarking at Bjarne. My take is, Bjane wanted 1980s Unix programmers to like his semicolon language because it was kinda-sorta C compatible, but most of them didn't. And so, he's been trying to change their minds for ~40 years. It's not OK to still be here in 2023 trying to make it happen, a lot of them have retired, some of them are dead, it's not going to happen.

I seriously doubt he feels a gratification deficit, given how far and wide C++'s use for serious projects has been.

He tried leaving many times, and other people convinced him to stay in WG21. Your posts are nonsense and you know nothing of C++ history or semicolons.

"But for all that, to my thinking, he would fain have had it"

(Casca in Julius Caesar, however the play is in this case describing an event actually mentioned in Plutarch)

This feels like a needlessly hostile take. As someone who uses C++ daily, I am glad Bjarne is still around and contributing to the language.

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