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Comment by _hao | Hacker News Reader

I have the utmost respect for Casey, but his disdain for Stroustrup is unfounded. The fact of the matter is C++ occupied a niche in the right place and at the right time, and it grew from there. Many mistakes have been made, but Stroustrup is in no way personally responsible for all of them and I don't think Stroustrup is a bad programmer (something I've heard Casey say in some of his videos). You can argue that the committee route is not the best, but C++ is here to stay and by some metrics adoption is actually growing.

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I agree. His negativity has probably detracted quite a few people from him that otherwise are quite aligned. Still, his historical remark is rather peculiar.

As for the language, yes, sadly, it’s with us seemingly to stay. I code it professionally and I can’t find a single interesting, or even good, thing about it. Apart from wide adoption of course. Everything about it feels extremely badly designed from the user perspective (though it’s probably technically very impressive) with many details, that probably the sanest strategy is to use a small subset of the language. At least I don’t have to use STL at work, that’s something positive, I guess :)

Strangely, I've never seen any nice code from Casey despite all of the mud slinging he's done over the years. Maybe it exists somewhere but I watched a lot of Handmade Hero when it was starting off and the code was a mess.

It feels as though he just attracted an audience of junior developers who take everything he says as gospel, as is often the case with social media programmers. Lord knows I've argued with some of them and they usually crumble as soon as they don't have one of his opinions to throw back at you.

I'm confused. I looked at the Handmade Hero videos and I had no trouble following - it was simple straightforward procedural code. As I understand it, his code does "exist somewhere". Bink 2 from RAD Game Tools, which seems to ship with practically all games. He also developed the Walk System that shipped in "The Witness" (2016). You can see his blog posts and video lecture about that. I see that he and a Jay Stelly from Valve simplified the GJK algorithm, and he talks about how to implement it. I know he has his Performance-Aware Programming series, where he talks about the technical details of hardware and how they relate to code performance. Here, I even found a tweet listing all the things he'd written till that point: <https://xcancel.com/cmuratori/status/1412839131063873536>. Perhaps you didn't look hard enough?

Can someone give me links to Bjarne Stroustrup's code? I tried searching but I'm having a hard time finding anything. I would like to verify some of the claims being made in the other comments (it's hard to tell if someone's code is better or worse relative to another person's without having access to the code and comparing important metrics and all that.)

You've attacked a strawman.

> You can argue that the committee route is not the best, but C++ is here to stay and by some metrics adoption is actually growing.

You can argue that chemical companies route is not the best, but cancer is here to stay and by some metrics adoption is actually growing.

Casey also got less aggressive when talking about Stroupstrup lately, especially after his last talk at Better software conference, where he mentioned him multiple times with a lot more historical context.

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