Is C++ a 'Really Terrible Language'? (gamesindustry.biz) 603
Long-time Slashdot reader slack_justyb writes, "Jonathan Blow, an independent video game developer, indicated to gamesindustry.biz that while working on a recent project he stopped and considered how miserable programming can be. After some reflection Blow came to the realization as to why. [C++ is a] 'really terrible, terrible language.'"
The main flaw with C++, in Blow's opinion, is that it's a fiendishly complex and layered ecosystem that has becoming increasingly convoluted in its effort to solve different problems; the more layers, the higher the stack, the more wobbly it becomes, and the harder it is to understand.
"Blow is the developer of two games so far -- Braid and The Witness -- and developed a new programming language known as Jai in hopes to help C++ game developers become more productive."
With Jai, Blow hopes to achieve three things: improve the quality of life for the programmer because "we shouldn't be miserable like many of us are"; simplify the systems; and increase expressive power by allowing programmers to build a large amount of functionality with a small amount of code.
Long-time Slashdot reader xx_chris calls C++ "the triumph of syntax over clarity," while in the interview Blow calls C++ 'a weird mess.' But the original submission ends with these questions. "Is Blow correct? Has C++ become a horrific mess that we should ultimately relegate to the bins of COBOL and Pascal? Are there redeeming qualities of C++ that justify the tangle it has become?
"And is Jai a solution or just yet another programming language?"
The main flaw with C++, in Blow's opinion, is that it's a fiendishly complex and layered ecosystem that has becoming increasingly convoluted in its effort to solve different problems; the more layers, the higher the stack, the more wobbly it becomes, and the harder it is to understand.
"Blow is the developer of two games so far -- Braid and The Witness -- and developed a new programming language known as Jai in hopes to help C++ game developers become more productive."
With Jai, Blow hopes to achieve three things: improve the quality of life for the programmer because "we shouldn't be miserable like many of us are"; simplify the systems; and increase expressive power by allowing programmers to build a large amount of functionality with a small amount of code.
Long-time Slashdot reader xx_chris calls C++ "the triumph of syntax over clarity," while in the interview Blow calls C++ 'a weird mess.' But the original submission ends with these questions. "Is Blow correct? Has C++ become a horrific mess that we should ultimately relegate to the bins of COBOL and Pascal? Are there redeeming qualities of C++ that justify the tangle it has become?
"And is Jai a solution or just yet another programming language?"
Yes (Score:2, Funny)
Yeap.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope.
People who don't understand C++ are doomed to recreate it, badly.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
I use lots of C++. I also ignore major portions of it. I do not need all of it. There is nothing saying you have to use every bit of it. It is good to know all the bits though and understand how the tool can help you get things done. Take for example Visual Basic 6. Not exactly a 'bad' language. But it sure let lots of bad things to be created. That is because it was an easy lang to pick up and make a mess of. Being good at what you do takes time. There are no shortcuts. Blaming C++ is kind of a fad. Because like all languages terrible things can be done in it. It will not stop you from doing that. It expresses what you want. If you are not good at what you do you will express bad things. I have seen monsters made in pretty much every language at this point. None of them are 'good' at stopping you from making crap code.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't happen much, but this time I'm going to have to agree with Anonymous Coward. All that will be accomplished by making programming languages easier is fostering the proliferation of even less qualified jackasses flooding the market with dangerously insecure and buggy code.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea of programming as a semiskilled task, practiced by people with a few months' training, is dangerous. We wouldn't tolerate plumbers or accountants that poorly educated. We don't have as an aim that architecture (of buildings) and engineering (of bridges and trains) should become more accessible to people with progressively less training. Indeed, one serious problem is that currently, too many software developers are undereducated and undertrained. Obviously, we don't want our tools--including our programming languages--to be more complex than necessary. But one aim should be to make tools that will serve skilled professionals--not to lower the level of expressiveness to serve people who can hardly understand the problems, let alone express solutions. We can and do build tools that make simple tasks simple for more people, but let's not let most people loose on the infrastructure of our technical civilization or force the professionals to use only tools designed for amateurs.
- Bjarne S.
Re: Yes (Score:5, Informative)
I'm convinced that you could design a language about a tenth of the size of C++ (whichever way you measure size) providing roughly what C++ does.
- Bjarne S.
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I would believe that. There's about two dozen ways to iterate through an STL vector class; by integer index, by iterator begin/end, by auto iterator by value, by auto iterator by reference, these can be done backwards from end to start as well. Another combination is whether to pre-increment or post-increment. But only one method will actually be the fastest on any platform. Then you could use pthreads to parallelize things or maybe Intel TBB blocks. Depending on whether you are working with vector data, th
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Try actually signing up for a Lisp class and you'll find out exactly why.
Re:Yes - Bless You (Score:4, Insightful)
When one hires chimpanzees to write code, one gets code written by chimpanzees. No language tool will make up for lack of understanding. The more flexible a tool, the easier it is to write code that is simply horrid. To turn around and blame the language is disingenuous at best and at worst, promulgates the idea that good code is easy and within the grasp of just any old person.
Anyone can play a scale on a piano. Anyone can figure out what the notes on the music mean. That does not mean that anyone can play Frédéric Chopin's Minute Waltz. More to the point, a "better" piano won't fix this.
Re:Yes - Bless You (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, as I always have said:
A good craftsperson does not blame the tools — not because you could hand that person terrible tools and get the same results as with great tools, but rather because the person would know what various tools do well, and would find ways to work within their limitations to create something good.
The same is true for programming languages. Different languages are good at different things. I'd rather smash my head repeatedly with a ball-peen hammer than deal with giant steaming piles of templates, but stick embedded C++ in the kernel without all that STL baggage or exception handling or multiple inheritance or RTTI or any of the other junk that makes the C++ runtime so bloated, and you end up with a halfway decent language for writing device driver stacks.
Need to use piles of regular expressions for some reason? Perl.
Need a lightweight template-based web backend language for a small-ish website? PHP.
Need a language for writing client code? Objective-C.
Need a language for writing enterprise-scale server code? Java.
Need a language for full-stack development by a single development team? Javascript, but don't do that. Really. Don't do that.
And so on.
Re: Yes (Score:3)
Bad example. An architect who designs mostly single-family homes, strip malls, and chain restaurants isn't going to design megastructures like the Burj Khalifa, EVEN IF the buildings they design are visually-spectacular works of art that are perfectly-tailored to their intended uses.
Ditto, for a thoroughly-competent & thorough (but mostly un-creative) structural engineer... you might sleep better at night knowing that he or she designed the bridge you could be driving on when an earthquake strikes, but
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. Even Bjarne said (something like): "Inside C++ is a smaller, cleaner language trying to get out".
The trick is to learn what to use and what not to use.
The main problems C++ has are:
a) It's hard to learn C++ by hacking away at it. Some things are counter-intuitive, a good C++ mentor can save you years.
b) It's not a platform. Casual programmers don't want a "language", they want a platform.
The bottom line is this though: C++ allows you to precisely express anything you want to do. You never hit a brick wall like you do in other languages.
Also: Garbage collection is a red herring. Nobody manages RAM in C++ because C++ understands RAII like no other language. All the garbage collected languages handle RAM OK but RAM is only one type of resource. You end up explicitly closing files, etc., when you finish with them. In practice, GC actually creates more work for you compared to C++.
Re: Yes (Score:2)
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Each job requires a slightly different subset, yes.
There's not much you could take out of C++ without harming it in some way, every feature is needed in some circumstance or other.
The only completely useless feature I con think of is C++ arrays - new[] and delete[] don't do anything that can't be done much better with std::vector.
(nb. Arrays were added before templates so that's why they're there)
There's also a bunch of small tweaks that could make it better, eg. require {} on all code blocks.
Re: Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
new[] and delete[] don't do anything that can't be done much better with std::vector.
Well, they can be used to implement std::vector.
Rust is that beautiful language within C++ (Score:5, Interesting)
Bjarne is right: there is a smaller, beautiful language within C++: it is called Rust. Mozilla has taken the best parts of C++ like its fast performance and its flexible abstractions and created the ultra-safe, ultra-productive and ultra-powerful modern programming language called Rust. While C++ will probably never go away, more and more C++ programmers are opting to use Rust instead because it is so much like C++, yet so much better at the same time.
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All the garbage collected languages handle RAM OK but RAM is only one type of resource. You end up explicitly closing files, etc., when you finish with them.
...say people who never heard of unwind-protect.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
Inside C++ is a small(er), clean(er) language trying to get out, but it's still neither a small nor a clean language. It's still a verbose, inconsistent, badly designed language.
Why do you need to separately declare and then define every piece of your API? Because that's how C worked, and C did it that way because of the limitations of compilers in 1977. It's totally unnecessary in a modern language, and it makes your code way less clean. But that's how C++ works.
Why are templates designed in a way that makes you put the entire implementation in the header file? That was totally unnecessary, and it leads to clunky code. But that's how C++ works.
How come if a parent class doesn't mark its destructor as virtual, all subclasses will (silently) fail to get cleaned up correctly? This is just bad design. It's probably caused countless bugs over the years.
The language is full of inconsistencies because no one ever bothered to fix them. Why is "this" a pointer instead of a reference? Why does exception.what() return a char* instead of a string&? There are tons of minor points like this that could easily have been better if someone had bothered to think about consistency. But no one did.
You can avoid the worst parts of C++, but what remains is still a poor substitute for a well designed language.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Informative)
Why do you need to separately declare and then define every piece of your API? Because that's how C worked, and C did it that way because of the limitations of compilers in 1977. It's totally unnecessary in a modern language, and it makes your code way less clean. But that's how C++ works.
You don't have to. You can define all your code inside of the class, like in Java. It's up to the compiler/linker to store that mess somewhere. But for non-template code, it's more efficient (speed and memory) to have this separated, for both compiling and linking.
Why are templates designed in a way that makes you put the entire implementation in the header file? That was totally unnecessary, and it leads to clunky code. But that's how C++ works.
Because the compiling of the template is totally depending of the template arguments. Last time I've looked into Java, there were no templates (or even variadic templates), so this is really not comparable.
How come if a parent class doesn't mark its destructor as virtual, all subclasses will (silently) fail to get cleaned up correctly? This is just bad design. It's probably caused countless bugs over the years.
Only if the subclasses have virtual functions, then you should also make the destructor virtual. There are good reasons to have non-virtual destructors in parent classes. Why should I pay for a feature, if I don't need it? Here static code analysis helps.
The language is full of inconsistencies because no one ever bothered to fix them. Why is "this" a pointer instead of a reference?
Is this really an inconsitency? For me, pointers are no problem, they are an additional grade of freedom for expressing what I want. Yes, references are internally only pointers with the same speed and they normally don't have the value 0 (as long as you did not mess them up), but last is also true for 'this'. So it really doesn't matter.
Why does exception.what() return a char* instead of a string&?
Good question, but nearly irrelevant in well designed programs, that try to avoid exceptions during normal program flow. However, if you want to concatenate constant strings at compile time to get better error messages, there are tricks with variadic templates. With gcc, this even works with __PRETTY_FUNCTION__.
There are tons of minor points like this that could easily have been better if someone had bothered to think about consistency. But no one did. You can avoid the worst parts of C++, but what remains is still a poor substitute for a well designed language.
Perhaps. This language is for professionals. It is huge and there are pitfalls. But it gives you the neccessary freedom to express *exactly* what you want. C had been designed as a shortcut for Assembler and this is still true for C++; there is no virtual machine in between. If you write business applications, well, then use something else, but I do embedded development in the automotive sector and here C++ is exactly what I want.
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Why are templates designed in a way that makes you put the entire implementation in the header file?
Oh is that a thing? I am nothing more than a casual hacker at the language, more of a C person. The other day I saw my first template and was confused that the header seemed to do the heavy lifting.
I'm always amazed at the things I learn on Slashdot.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes and no, I agree you can do clean, lean good code in C++, but its when you try to avoid reinventing the wheel by pulling in 3rd party libraries that it all goes wrong. Or even the std ones for that matter - the string template library is a classic example, a monster of templates and polymorphism gone insane. If I have to pull out the docs to remember how to convert a string to lowercase, there's a problem.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
There is nothing saying you have to use every bit of it.
Other than the guy you inherited the codebase from.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope you get modded way up! This is the fallacy of the "but only use a subset and you are good".
Real world programmers must maintain and modify code bases that have been written by people that no one currently at the company even knows.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
The discussion is moot when it involves inherited codebases. You are compelled to use the tools already selected whether you like them or not.
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It's not any simpler than C++ though. Right now it's probably still more productive to learn to use C++ properly.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Firefox is starting to use Rust (Score:5, Interesting)
Linus Torvalds:
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I take your point, but I don't entirely agree with it. I think whether performance or maintainability matters more depends a lot on context. Both are valuable attributes, but both can reach a level that is good enough to get the job done, and improving them beyond that point offers a much lower return. Where that point is depends a great deal on both what you're doing now and what you might want to do later.
In any case, the days when writing in C or C++ was an effective guarantee of very good performance ar
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Hence, go
Re: Yes (Score:2)
There are a lot of existing languages usable for gaming, why create a new one? Some even can be translated to C++ or javascript, like Haxe, already used succesfully for some commercial videogames..
Blow is in good company (Score:4, Informative)
Even Stroustrup himself has been having second thoughts about building a time machine to go back and kill his own grandmother.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/... [theregister.co.uk]
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C/C++ isn’t horrible especially with its more modern versions.
That said it isn’t the best language for a lot of needs.
My work I need to make a lot of small apps developed quickly. The C language including C, C++, Java, C# often require a lot of overhead for many of the small get it done jobs.
However if it a bigger development project where speed, and lower level access is needed as well needing a bigger development staff it becomes more useful over the scripting language like Python.
C++ is a terribly documented language. (Score:5, Interesting)
Powell's Books | The World's Largest Independent Bookstore [powells.com]
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If you were just rewriting some moldy old C or C++ library (ffmpeg and gdal come to mind as particularly moldy,) in C++11, the library would probably be a lot easier to write because of the new stuff in C++11.
Of cou
Use a subset (Score:2, Insightful)
And choose your libraries wisely.
Know what things to avoid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of the challenge of using a language is not just knowing all of the things you *can* do. It is also knowing which things are best to avoid, and what the pitfalls are.
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Depends how you define "performant"... Which isn't a real word but the point is that if you want performance on say an MCU, C++ is mostly useless and you will end up writing code that is 90% C with a bit of OO for organisation.
Even on powerful systems the best performance is only available if you avoid using C++ features that cause memory allocation and the like, at which point you are mostly using it to make the code itself nicer.
On a related note I think this is one of the major reasons that driver code i
No it's not. (Score:2, Insightful)
No C++ is not a terrible language.
It's still IMHO the best general purpose language there is, but it has grown a devilishly high threshold to master.
With "general purpose" I mean a language you can use in both user-mode and kernel-mode, that you can use to express and implement anything in.
It's like a toolchest with so many tools it'd baffle a newcomer, and probably not even half of them would be user by a master craftsman in a single project, but together they create the best toolchest there is - is lookin
Re:No it's not. (Score:5, Insightful)
Doctor, it hurts when I go like this (Score:2, Insightful)
If one uses every single feature of C++, then it's probably a really terrible language.
If one only uses features that make C++ better than C, then it's usually good enough.
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You are holding it wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
You can write really good or really bad code in pretty much any language. Generally if your code ends up unreadable, you are doing it wrong.
That being said, if the semantics of a language tend to encourage people to write horrible code, does it make it a bad language? Good question. Discuss.
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any language with a turing complete macro system is garbage
Re:You are holding it wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
That being said, if the semantics of a language tend to encourage people to write horrible code, does it make it a bad language? Good question. Discuss.
My first observation about C++ is that the best examples of clean, well-written code in C++ tend to use a very constrained subset of the language.
My next observation is that over the years many of the features added to C++ seem to be very obscure and seem to address odd corner cases. I suspect this is because of some deep design flaw in the language.
C++ tends to reward a programmer who can design clean, graceful interfaces that can successfully evolve over their lifetimes. And C++ mercilessly punishes programmers who cannot do that. Unfortunately, the vast majority of programmers cannot design clean, graceful interfaces. And very few programmers can do so all the time.
So yes, in my opinion if a language makes it too easy to write horrible code and very challenging to write great code it is probably a horrible language.
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Create C+++ Then - With A New Syntax (Score:3)
Re:Create C+++ Then - With A New Syntax (Score:5, Funny)
Keep the compiler, keep all the powerful capabilities of C++, and add an alternative syntax - a friendlier one [...] There is your "new" language - C+++.
Go one step farther and make it four pluses, arrange them in two rows of two and you have C#.
C++ is great (Score:4, Interesting)
You can write really great code, short and powerful. You can also write really bad code. In this way it's similar to other languages. However, I've found it far easier to write multiperson, maintainable code in C++ than in JavaScript.
It does suffer some from things like iterators and safe pointers being added... 1/2 way through it's lifecycle. And therefore, they are less clear than they could be.
Re:C++ is great (Score:5, Insightful)
Saying it's better than Javascript isn't a ringing endorsement.
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However, I've found it far easier to write multiperson, maintainable code in C++ than in JavaScript.
Having worked with well-written projects in both languages (as well as several others), I must disagree. Javascript can be written with maintainability in mind and it doesn't take a genius to do so, only discipline. But C++ is difficult to work with even in the hands of an experienced developer. You end up spending half of your time wrestling with the language to get it to do what you want and the other half digging through core dumps. It's also extremely unforgiving of any mistake. If you're lucky, the ent
Re:C++ is great (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, the compiler can enforce certain rules, but it's not foolproof and there are lots of ways to misuse a class or function that the compiler cannot check. At some point, the person using the interface needs to understand how it works. While clear documentation is far more important than the code itself for that purpose, diving into the implementation to figure out some detail still happens quite often, as is looking at the unit tests.
The more recent changes to C++ significantly improved readability, but still not to the degree higher-level languages can accomplish. I still run into macro and template magic that takes far longer than it should for me to parse.
Was OK for the '80's, But Its Time Has Past (Score:5, Interesting)
C++ is a 1980's language (actually, Bjorn started work in 1979). It's lasted long enough that we don't have to shed any tears for its demise.
We have many better options today. Personally, I am writing in Crystal [crystal-lang.org], and you can see my explorations here:
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Consider what Linux was at the start, and what it is now. That's how Open Source works. I think the quality of the language will assure its growth, as Linux grew from the hobby project of a pimply computer science lecturer at a Helsinki college whose wife is much more macho than him (she's a martial arts champ), to the OS behind an industry. It happens there is a company behind the Crystal developers. But they are a small team, and they collect money donations from the public.
ALOTD (another language of the day) (Score:4, Interesting)
I am no fan of c++, and I agree it is terrible. But, creating yet a other language sounds a bit over the top.
I am convinced this is happening for one reason, companies do not want to train anyone! If they took the the time to properly train people the industry would not be in this state, now we get new methodologies and languages every other day.
When I started out, senior people spent a lot of time with me showing how I can improve my skills and how the business works. These days you are expected to muddle along hoping to learn your job. No wonder we are having large breaches and crappy software
How about no? (Score:2)
Re: How about no? (Score:2)
The biggest issue IMHO (Score:2)
C++ is so big/complex/rich that different people or groups use different subsets, from 'better ANSI C' to 'Object hierarchies everywhere with lots of templates.' I've seen code that obviously started as "my first OO project" with classes including copy constructors and getters/setters for the most primitive structures that were later changed with basic C code and friend declarations so that this code could work around the class structure. And a bit of STL here and Boost there.
Give me C any day of the week;
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Have templates ever improved? Back in the day, compile-time errors were nighmarish.
Re: The biggest issue IMHO (Score:2)
Never learned C++ (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been programming for over 40 years (shudder..) and have always used C. Never seen a need for C++ for the sort of things that I do.
Perhaps it's because I don't do games and fancy graphics. I do things like counting pulses from water meters and getting coordinates from survey instruments.
You could get some really fancy graphics out of Amigas using C, though. :)
C++ is an engineering language (Score:3)
It is one of the things that is easy to learn, but takes many years to master.
The proper way to do things take a lot of discipline, and looking at the culmination of effort bringing really stable and predictable systems is satisfying. It is no longer as "visible" as other languages, but many of the software people use daily is still mostly C++ (and C of course). For Linux there is still heavy C usage (in the Kernel, X11/Wayland, and Gnome). However KDE desktop, LibreOffice, VLC, Firefox and many other projects are done in C++. Similarly for Windows low level interfaces are already in C++, and MacOS kernel and UI libraries also use C++, and Objective C++ (but not exclusively).
Yes, they are not "sexy" software items, but they work, and I have seen much less exceptions, crashes, and failures in proven C++ code, compared to many Java, Python, or JavaScript code.
A few new low level programming languages are trying to change the situation, but the progress is slow. It could be said that D was the initial one, later Go, and Rust came along. But still most non-experimental low level and mission critical software is still developed in C or C++.
So, no C++ is not a terrible language. It gets results, and many organizations still prefer to keep using it. Unlike older generation languages like COBOL (abandoned by banks), FORTRAN (abandoned for R/Python in scientific research), or Pascal (abandoned by Apple for ObjC++), the C++ community is still thriving.
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It wasn't always shit (Score:3, Insightful)
Before c++11, c++ had great features that helped you write cleaner code.
The last time I bothered in a bureaucratic way with c++ was in 2013 when I was in a committee to send some features in for suggestion.
The meeting had a lot of people yelling at a guy who was part of isocpp iirc half a decade ago, and he flew from usa for that purpose.
I left in the middle of this shit.
Long story short and I am adding here not only my opinion but the opinion of every colleague who wrote c++ in research labs in different hierarchy levels inside an os, C devs do need C++ to help them write code easier, without hassles and give them more tools when they need them.
C++ the last 10 years has been adopting the web dev language cycle.
You have to have the bleeding edge of features to stay relevant...as frameworks languages and apis die and born every day.
C++ has no enemies, yet it's getting tackled by its own people.
Instead of having powerful lean language, just like C, you have a clusterfuck of a language.
I stopped using the bewest and coolest features because most of them are useless and don't worth the extra effort to include them in your programming style and most importantly there are out there a shitload of colleagues who don't know or care about the latest and greatest feature.... Because they are s/w engineers, not programming hipsters.
I don't think c++ will ever recover. It will grow and grow in terms of features and also those features will become more and more irrelevant as less and less people will adopt them.
Tbh C with classes had a negative meaning 15 years ago. Now it seems like the sane way of writing good and intuitive c++ code.
Maybe it's just me.
Not my problem! (Score:4, Funny)
C++ is one reason why I gave up programming and became a prostitute.
Re:Not my problem! (Score:5, Funny)
C++ is one reason why I gave up programming and became a prostitute.
So PHP.
Person hates X, invents Y (Score:3)
These sorts of stories come up fairly regularly here on Slashdot. And, each time they do, it reminds me of the classic XKCD:
https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
This doesn’t just apply to no-name indie developers... the good folks at Google are some of the worst offenders in this regard.
I dunno, are swords really terrible weapons? (Score:3)
Of course not. If it's 10,000 BC and your opponent is wielding an antelope's femur, having a sword is an overwhelming advantage! But in modern times, that answer changes. Now, a person clearly *can* be very effective with a sword, with a lot of training. But they could be much more effective with a .38, with much less training.
C++ is kind of like the sword of programming. It occupies an important place in history that should be remembered, and in the right hands, it's still fearsome. But gimme a break - in modern times, there are just better options, in every arena of computing. Other languages offer faster learning curves, less ability to blow your foot off because you didn't know some obscure intricacy of the language, and are simpler in pretty much every conceivable way.
C++ is a relic we should regard with a certain reverence, while not taking it seriously for the future.
Jai? (Score:2)
Jai sounds like a vent for the frustrations of this guy who hates C++. There are no public compilers yet, and the GitHub page is an unofficial source derived from YouTube videos. Sounds like more talk than results.
This is not your grandfather's C++ (Score:4, Interesting)
Modern C++ looks nothing like C++ of the years past. C++ is a comparatively old language, it's been around for over 30 (!) years.
And for the longest time C++ was gathering dist, stagnating, and remaining basically unchanged. But an effort begun to update the language, and since 2011 in my estimation C++ is now at least three times as big, and as complex as it was before.
Folks who've been around the block for a while started getting someone shocked coming across C++ code that looked nothing like the C++ they knew. And people who attempt to start learning C++ from scratch were confronted with the entire, 100% complexity, of modern C++ right off the bat.
And that's, IMO, is where the current bad rap for C++ is coming from. It is a hard, complicated, language to learn. But it's been my experience that once I spent th effort to learn the nuts and the bolts of modern C++, I found it to be a very powerful, rich, capable language. I don't think I would've been able to write LibCXXW [libcxx.org] in 2003 C++. It would've taken me five or six times longer than it did. Modern C++ attempts, in made ways, to bring many of the benefits of other, VM-based languages like Java and Perl, and bolt them on top of a compiled framework.
Some time ago, on stackoverflow, I read a question from someone wondering why their C++ compiler was running out of memory compiling their code. I looked at it. The shown code attempted to implement Sieve Of Eratosthenes in the compiler itself. That is, the code was not trying to implement it itself, but make the C++ compiler do it, via templates, with the actual code resulting in a static array of prime numbers. And the question was why the poor compiler was running out of RAM...
Try that, with Java.
C++ has the same issue as JavaScript (Score:2)
C++ and JavaScript share a common issue, in that both languages have some design problems that they carry with them, but both are popular and have layers of syntax accumulation and libraries, and both will allow you to write some terrible code.
However, if you have a firm understanding of the languages (and the pitfalls particular to each), you can also write solid and elegant code in either language. It's more a matter of avoiding their bad parts than anything else, but it requires knowledge and discipline
No it doesn't (Score:2)
While I agree with the core of your thesis that you can create good and bad code, I have to disagree from the perspective of how applications are architected.
JavaScript requires a different mindset to handle exceptions and handle/recover from errors. I find it quite difficult to make sure that code flags an error properly and doesn't continue blindly on. This is okay for a fairly simple web app (which is what it was created for) but lousy when you have an application that communicates with other systems a
Yes. Yes it is (Score:2)
Java gets a lot of crap but damn it, C++ drives me up a wall.
Specifics? (Score:2)
Even the article doesn't have any.
Yes and no (Score:3)
Yes it's terrible, no Jai or Rust or D or any other "language of the week" isn't going to replace it. They all fail on something. D has garbage collection. Rust comes with politics and really annoying fans. C++ doesn't even have fans. Plus C++ is well-entrenched; it'll be harder to dislodge than Fortran
And yes, there is a smaller and more elegant language inside C++ screaming to get out. It's called "C".
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And yes, there is a smaller and more elegant language inside C++ screaming to get out. It's called "C".
Especially C string handling, that's really elegant.
C arrays, too. Data structures that don't know how many elements they contain are awesome! Give me more of those....
Data abstraction? A piece of elegant cake in C. Take a look at the OpenSL ES library for an example of an easy to use library written in C.
Stuck with C++ (Score:3)
Almost two decades ago a I had a Thinkgeek C++ round bumper sticker on my car because I thought the language was the bees' knees. Today I'm finding myself holding my tongue in watching videos from C++Con which quickly go from 1 to 10 in terms of complexity; where only the smartest of developers can remember all of the rules and the exceptions to leverage modern day C++. I feel as if the movers and shakers of the C++ language spec have an inner social circle and have lost touch with the wider developer audience.
Having used C#, Actionscript, LUA, Python and dabbled just enough in Swift and Rust, I believe that C++ either needs to have a fundamental change to break the axiom of backwards compatibility or it will be replaced by Rust, Go, or some other (LLVM) language that has been inspired by C/C++ but has a simpler, consistent syntax made for modern day computing.
My prediction: when underlying, low-level OS components are replaced with non-C, non-C++ counterparts, that will be the beginning of a global acceptance for a new language standard. Until then there will always be a place for C/C++. I really hope this change happens in the next ten years; I'm not holding my breath though.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
For certain values of terrible. (Score:4, Insightful)
C++ is, IMO, terrible.
I hate that it allows polymorphism. Worse, it makes people think that polymorphism is a desirable feature that helps create clear, readable code.
It encourages the creation of functions that operate on classes instead of on generic data types.
For example, if a C++ program has a "car" class that include the elements "miles" and "gas" a C++ programmer is likely to create a function
car::calc_mpg() which requires (seemingly) no arguments, rather than the more generic calc_mpg(int miles, int gas)
The problem is, the first is not reusable, and depends heavily on knowledge of the car class.
It encourages inheritance, which fundamentally breaks the box-model (a.k.a. the black-box-model) of programming.
Rather than breaking things into discrete, understandable chunks, it encourages massive classes that must be understood in their entirety.
Then there's operator overloading, code that can be executed before main(), putting code in unexpected places... I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
The main problem is, C++ adds stuff with the unjustified expectation that more stuff automatically mean better.
Sometimes more stuff is worse.
Re: (Score:3)
Anyone who writes the way you described has a very poor understanding of OOP.
No TRUE C++ programmer would ever program that way, eh?
All the basic features of C++ (inheritance, polymorphism, classes, and objects) make writing large systems MUCH easier than they would be without those features.
I've seen this kind of claim many times - and yet, the evidence is that C++ programs aren't any better that ADA, or even FORTRAN when it comes to writing large systems.
Classes only help when they're built correctly, and C++ encourages lazy people to create them poorly.
GOTO didn't force people to write spaghetti code, but that's what actually happened.
Sure, you can write good code in C++, but what is there in the actual language that encourages it?
I remember⦠(Score:3)
So around 15 years ago, when I was starting my career in the games industry, there was a post here on slashdot about how someone had finally proven that the language did not have a bad recursion in it. In the comments was a programmer who I think may have been working at Microsoft talking about how every compiler programmer would go into writing a C++ compiler excited to be the first one that implemented the full language specification and having the Hope slowly beaten out of them, until they finally arrived on a sufficient compromise. And so compilers would all implement their own specific subset of the language and there was virtually no cross compatibility.
So the language started as an unimplementable mess of a spec, and unless someone has been doing some very hard work to make the language LESS complex, I greatly suspect that it has stayed that way, despite the smattering of quality of life upgrades that have been thrown to us.
In my mind, the greatest sin will always be template metaprogramming, a discoveredâ"not plannedâ"feature that was the consequence of a problem that should not have existed in the first place. They planned poorly in the beginning, threw some more bad planning on top, and ended up with a monumental clusterfuck that will be obfuscating codebases until the end of time.
tl;dr Yes, goddamnit.
Simplicity vs Brevity (Score:4, Informative)
STL & Boost (Score:4, Interesting)
STL was a great improvement in its day, but I haven't been a fan for years, nor for Boost. Both are often cryptically written, poorly documented, and overly abstracted compared to modern frameworks. But, instead of improving on these standards with lessons learned from more recent efforts with languages and development kits, the C++ standards committee has doubled down on antiquity.
I haven't looked back.
C++ is fine as long as... (Score:3)
C++ is fine as long as you stay at a feature level before C++11 and don't use STL (well maybe simple use of containers like string a vector are OK but definately stop there).
Pascal? Now wait a minute ... (Score:4, Informative)
You're welcome to relegate Pascal to the equivalent bin as COBOL, when there is another language that offers what Free Pascal [freepascal.org] and its corresponding Lazarus IDE [lazarus-ide.org] offer: cross-platform RAD resulting in lightning fast native executables on more platforms than any other development solution that I know of - all of it at no cost.
What's wrong with pascal (Score:3)
Why is COBOL and C++ compared with Pascal? The first are languages with problems that were once popular and are now legacy with plenty of good positions. Pascal existed mostly in schools.
Re: (Score:2)
True, but it's not as horrible as all the other languages.
Re:Obcious (Score:5, Insightful)
Disagree. It's more convoluted than C, but adapts C's very error-prone syntax. It's more complex than Basic, FORTRAN or COBOL. It doesn't have the simplicity of Pascal nor the consistency of Java or Ada.
It's definitely a 'science experiment that escaped from the lab.'
Re: (Score:2)
Nope, C++ was designed to be a practical language every step of the way.
Most of the other languages you mention really were experiments that got way out of hand, especially Pascal and Java.
ref: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~ev... [virginia.edu]
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
So... just like most people's criticisms of C++ then?
No.
Re: (Score:3)
So... just like most people's criticisms of C++ then?
C++ has moved since the 1990s, too.
Yes except exactly backwards. Much of the problems of C++ is how it has moved since the 1990s.
Not Horrible, Just Mature (Score:3)
C++ is horrible. Just stating the obvious.
It's not horrible it is just mature. Good languages, like C++, start off with a very clear syntax that greatly simplifies some important programming tasks. As people get more familiar with the language they identify new programming patterns which the language cannot handle well and so new syntax or features are added leading to bloat.
C++ has been around for a while and has had lots of new things added to it making it a mature language. At some point, someone will come up with a new, general purpose lang
Re: (Score:3)
In addition to C++, there's PHP, Javascript, APL, Ada, and BASIC. Off the top of my head and not including novelty languages. (Also leaving off COBOL and pre-66 FORTRAN because nobody could know better then)
Re: (Score:3)