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Comment by wglb | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that Sid's code is "old school" and the C++ guys don't like it. I wonder if he uses C.

Funny, I read "old school" as a kinder euphemism for shoddy (with all due respect to Sid's brilliance as a designer and hacker). Sometimes great people write crap, unmaintainable code. I've known several types like this in the industries I've worked in. You need a small army of programmers who can respect coding standards to clean up after them.

As for C++, I've looked at some of the Civ 4 source and it seems fairly industry standard "game style" C++. It uses templates, but not heavily, and some boost to provide Python scripting.

I've heard the same thing - brilliant people can hold more in their head, so they can read and manipulate more complex code. They don't need to simplify and refactor as much as mere mortals do, and because they're so focused on results, they get something out as soon as it's done.

Generally speaking, anything the C++ guys don't like is good.

I'm curious, have you seen enough C++ to know the differences between 1990's C++ and 2000's C++, and really prefer 1990's C++ because "C++ guys don't like it"?

I'll bet it's some tight subset of C++, leaving out some of the more "advanced" features.

>I'll bet it's some tight subset of C++, leaving out some of the more "advanced" features.

Isn't that just the definition of sane code when it comes to C++?

Personally, I despise C++ for a number of reasons that I won't go into in this comment. OTOH, if the subset of C++ you use is roughly "C with classes and namespaces," then I can generally tolerate it.

I'm guessing it is more like he uses a lot of arrays and simple structs and the C++ guys want everything in classes, stuff like that.

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