Parody of an interview with Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++ | Hacker News Reader

Parody of an interview with Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++

odgaard.org

26 pointsgcv21 comments

Please make this thing stop; this is the Hacker News equivalent of those joke faxes that offices used to circulate in the '90s.

Parody, What Parody?

Most of us have held this to be a true confession

For a moment I actually found myself believing the interview. I could relate and identify with.

If you cannot learn C++, you are either plain old stupid or you don't belong in programming. C++ is very easy, the syntax is picked up in a week, and you can work without any libraries, you mostly just need to learn the API of the host system. If you can program in Ruby, you are capable enough to program in C++, and the only thing stopping you is just this 'myth' that C++ is hard.

Most C++ haters (e.g. me) can program in C++ and probably even do program in it sometimes, but just don't like to. I can certainly do anything in C++ I could do in any other language, just with a hell of a lot more cursing and kicking things.

C++ has many flaws. Let's have a C++ bashing party, hooray. However, a discussion of the merits of C++ boils down to C++ vs C as far as getting things done in the real world and in the domains where C++ and C are applicable. C is absolutely horrible. I cannot imagine why anyone would start a new program or module to a higher level language in C rather than C++. It's like choosing BASIC over a modern scripting language.

why anyone would start a new program or module to a higher level language in C rather than C++

Linus gives very good reasons for C vs. C++ here: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57643...

I personally don't have anything against C++, it is a perfect solution for some problems, but sometimes C may be a better choice.

This is a silly rant. All he really says is that too many C++ programmers have bad taste, in his opinion.

C++ is objectively a far more powerful and expressive language than C.

I largely agree with you. If I "hate" C++ so much, why do I program in it? The answer is that sometimes I need my code to be very fast, and C++ has language features making abstraction easier than C or Fortran. I think the main reason people choose C instead of C++ is that it is common to overuse C++'s language features, and if you target C, this is impossible. Otherwise, just take "new" and "delete" and write the rest of your program in C...

This does not mean that C++ is difficult. It just means that you may be used to easier languages, and your brain is not flexible enough to deal with C++.

Better question: why would anyone use a "harder" language, all else being equal?

Entrenchment. The main product I work on is 3.5 million lines of C++, built with MCF and ATL. We can frankestein other technologies into there, but its expensive and clunky. The cost of rewriting the whole thing is prohibitive, so C++ it is.

C++ is very easy, the syntax is picked up in a week, and you can work without any libraries, you mostly just need to learn the API of the host system.

You don't know C++.

What's the hard part of the syntax compared to a language like ruby? Interfaces? Classes? Inheritance? Templates? Exceptions? Ruby has equivalent interface elements, and there is not much of a difference in difficulty level between learning the one or the other.

I learnt C++ in 2 weeks 7 years ago, and it was easy. The difficulty comes with learning to use the libraries and host APIs, but that is exactly the same for every other language I've learnt since then.

I've seen several 'hard' engineers (physicists with Matlab experience) learn C++ in a couple of weeks. It's doable but... as you might expect, the code they pump out is terrible. There's a huge difference between doing basic C++ and being productive and efficient in it.

Things Ruby isn't concerned with that people typically have problems with in C++:

- No compiling or linking phase in Ruby. Linking problems can be hairy in large systems.

- Header file hell

- The static keyword (there are four different contexts)

- Difference between a pointer and reference

- public, private, protected inheritance

- Differences between dispatch (and underlying impl) of virtual and nonvirtual methods

- method hiding

- diamond of death

- visibility vs accessibility

- casting idioms (static, dynamic, const, reinterpret)

- ugly libraries (STL, ATL, MFC, COM) yeah, i said STL is ugly.

- templates (Ruby doesn't need templates since everything is dynamic)

- No language level string data type (our product has at least six representations of strings here and there that need to be converted at the bit level).

In college, where I majored in English, I thought I'd have an adventure and take a class in programming. They taught us C++. I never tried programming again.

Say I was foolish enough to try again on my own. Say I wanted to write my own version of Writeroom: http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom

What language would I want to learn, and is there a good beginner's guide?

the appropriate language for any given situation is largely dependent on the environment you're writing for. writeroom is a macosx program, so it's overwhelmingly likely that it was written in objective-c. you can google up beginner's guides all day long.

Dark Room (http://they.misled.us/dark-room), the Windows version, is written in C#.

Sorry, I should have realized the OS would be very important. I want to try writing a couple of Mac apps.

You can learn a part of C++ in a week or two weeks, but really internalizing all the subtle gotchas takes longer. Static initialization order fiasco? Exception-safety without needing catch (...) { ... throw; } clauses? Why X-is-a-Y implies pointer-to-X-is-a-pointer-t-Y but not pointer-to-pointer-to-X-is-a-pointer-to-pointer-to-Y? Why do I get a long pause when I exit this scope where I destroy just one object? How do I debug a segfault? How do I debug multithreaded deadlock? When should I use a virtual base class? Etc.

You can't learn all that stuff in a week or two. And maybe you shouldn't learn it at all; for many applications there are things that will work better than C++ without so much complexity, whether that's C or Java or Python.

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