Google Engineer Decries Complexity of Java, C++ 878
snydeq writes "Google distinguished engineer Rob Pike ripped the use of Java and C++ during his keynote at OSCON, saying that these 'industrial programming languages' are way too complex and not adequately suited for today's computing environments. 'I think these languages are too hard to use, too subtle, too intricate. They're far too verbose and their subtlety, intricacy and verbosity seem to be increasing over time. They're oversold, and used far too broadly,' Pike said. 'How do we have stuff like this [get to be] the standard way of computing that is taught in schools and is used in industry? [This sort of programming] is very bureaucratic. Every step must be justified to the compiler.' Pike also spoke out against the performance of interpreted languages and dynamic typing."
We all know the ideal language has two functions (Score:5, Funny)
doWhatIWant()
and
doItFaster(doWhatIWant)
Re:We all know the ideal language has two function (Score:5, Funny)
doWhatIWantEvenThoughImTellingYouToDoSomethingElse()
Re:We all know the ideal language has two function (Score:5, Funny)
workItHarder makeItBetter doItFaster makesUsStronger moreThanEverHourAfterHour workIsNeverOver
Re:We all know the ideal language has two function (Score:4, Funny)
What we have here is feature creep.
Re:We all know the ideal language has two function (Score:5, Funny)
neverGiveThisUp(You);
neverLetThisDown(You);
C too complex? Hilarious. (Score:3, Insightful)
One of C's great advantages is not only that it is simple and very fast, it is also very close to the hardware -- when you make local variables, structures, assignments, etc... you have a good idea what the compiler needs to do. Likewise control structures, statements and so on.
The reason it is used is -- frankly -- because it kicks the ass of every other language out there (except machine and assembly) when it comes to both size and performance. This is because a C fragment turns into something very eff
Re:C too complex? Hilarious. (Score:5, Insightful)
One of C's great advantages is not only that it is simple and very fast, it is also very close to the hardware -- when you make local variables, structures, assignments, etc... you have a good idea what the compiler needs to do. Likewise control structures, statements and so on.
That’s exactly the point... it’s too close to the hardware. Yes, it gives you really fine-grained control over what happens, and you can tweak it to make it as fast as possible. With the speed of today’s computers, though, you shouldn’t (usually) need that amount of optimization. Plus, the compiler should be robust enough to optimize the program nearly as well as you could anyway.
You don’t want to tell the computer every nitty-gritty detail. The computer is fast enough and powerful enough to do what you want it to do without you needing to exercise that level of control over how it actually does it. You just want to call a function that does what you want without worrying about the underlying hardware or algorithm that does it.
As programs get more and more complex, more and more abstraction is needed between the programmer and the hardware. This is not surprising. Someday, instead of saying “that’s like coding an entire application in assembly”, we might be saying “that’s like coding an entire application in C++”.
Re:C too complex? Hilarious. (Score:5, Insightful)
C's closeness to the hardware is probably why it has stayed relevant in the era of mobile computing and battery life. Some developers do need to tell the computer every nitty-gritty detail.
And video games (Score:5, Insightful)
Very hard to find a main stream game that isn't written in C++. What with Ms pushing XNA and some other stuff like that there may start being a few more written in managed languages, but C++ still reigns supreme. Why? Speed. You can write some real efficient (from the processor's point of view) code if needed, but it still has higher level functions like being OO and the boost libraries to make thing easier.
Even on games made to be extensible, C++ is usually at the core. Civ 4 is mostly XML and Python. Pretty much all data is stored in XML, and the interactions of that stored in Python. However, the game engine is written in C++, as is the AI's DLL. The game core maybe you argue that is because they didn't want people messing with it but the AI they released the source code for. It is C++ because speed is essential.
Some programmers love to whine about C and C++, but they endure for many reasons. I'd also point out they form the core of most OSes. Linux is written in C. The Windows kernel is written in C, the higher level API/ABI stuff in C++ and only some of the user stuff in .NET. OS-X is again C and C++ at the low level, and Objective-C higher up. All of this is not coincidence.
Re:C too complex? Hilarious. (Score:4, Informative)
umm... did you miss the part where the guy also bitched that interpreted languages are "too slow"?
so which is it? where on this stone are you going to squeeze the blood from? it's a tradeoff and the menu of available programming language choices is already comprehensive. this guy expresses it better and more comprehensively than i care to in a /. comment:
http://eatthedots.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-is-c-faster-than-python.html [blogspot.com]
and compiler research has only yielded 4% annual improvement in performance per Proebsting's law
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/toddpro/papers/law.htm [microsoft.com]
http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2006/cmsc430/lec18.4p.pdf [umd.edu]
and compiler researchers concede that a competent human will outperform a compiler for the foreseeable future. so your statement about compilers is total hand-waving away of facts inconvenient to your argument.
Re:C too complex? Hilarious. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly the reason I program in C and C++. Because it is hard. The level of knowledge required for entry into my field is higher and I am therefore surrounded by more competent engineers.
Anyone complaining that C/C++ is too hard needs to stay in GUI application and web development. Have fun, I say.
Re:C too complex? Hilarious. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:C too complex? Hilarious. (Score:5, Funny)
Yes and if you like Jesus, you also might like Jim Jones or Charles Manson. Push your cult elesewhere!
Re:C too complex? Hilarious. (Score:4, Funny)
But you can do anything in perl. Problem is you can do anything in perl (doesn't mean you should.)
Re:C too complex? Hilarious. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
Re:C too complex? Hilarious. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is because a C fragment turns into something very efficient
No it _can_ turn into something very efficient. But usually it is too much bother or the programmer is not competent enough and the program ends up being no more efficient than something coded in a different language.
Take a look at the programming language shootout. The C programs usually win the contest, but they do it by doing crazy things like looking up the cache size of the CPU and implementing their own version of malloc to fit a page size. The run of the mill C program is not like that.
For many or even most tasks stability and security is more important. Other languages provide those properties better than C.
Re:C too complex? Hilarious. (Score:4, Insightful)
You got modded flamebait because you dared question the less is more crowd that wants higher level languages that do
most of the lower level work for them.
The ppl that coded closer to the metal as you say mostly have grey hair now, and are looked at as legacy coders
by the new breed that want all that lower level coding done for them by the language.
As for it being complex, sure it is complex for most ppl, but for a college trained Comp Sci. major it should
be bread and butter and tools of the trade.
Ppl have declared we are giving a dumbed down education and I think this is a fair indicator of it.
C and Python complement each other (Score:5, Informative)
I must say I rarely find a comment on /. that I agree as much as I do with yours.
C and Python march hand in hand, one is for machine performance, the other is for programmer performance. If someone thinks C is too complex or too hard to learn then he shouldn't be working with programming computers, he's likely to cause great damage sooner or later.
However, there's one point where C will need a new approach: multiprocessing is coming. Since it seems like Moore's law has hit the ceiling at 3 GHz CPU speeds, all progress in performance for the foreseeable future will come from increasing the number of CPUs and cores working together.
I have done a lot of programming in multithreads using the pthread library lately and I feel that something better is needed, pthread is not close enough to the metal. I think some new fundamental elements may be needed in the language.
C is so great for programming because it mirrors the hardware closely. For instance, pointers work so well because they represent memory addresses. Before I learned C I had worked with Fortran, I still have some programs I wrote over 25 years ago. Today I look at those old Fortran programs and I wonder why I did some things the way I did. I see some convoluted loops and wonder why I did that because, with a quarter century hindsight on using pointers, I create almost instinctively the most efficient set of pointers to handle a data structure.
What programmers often don't realize is that the correct data structure may get orders of magnitude improvement in performance. To give one example, years ago, when I studied artificial neural networks, I read an article in the Doctor Dobb's magazine (January 1989, page 32, "Neural Networks and Noise Filtering" by Casey Klimasaukas). It was a good article, but the source code in C that came with it sucked. There was a struct _pe representing a processing element and each struct _pe had an array of struct _conn representing the connections to that element.
The problem is that in an artificial neural network what each neuron is doing is, basically, a convolution of two arrays. To do that efficiently in hardware you need to have the array elements contiguous in memory. When you put the connection weight in a structure together with other data you will not have that value contiguous with the weights of the other connections.
From an "object oriented" point of view that program was perfect. But if you want to use your multi-core CPU with that, the program sucks. That's the benefit you can get from programming in C that you won't get with other languages.
And don't tell me that raw performance does not matter because you can always get faster hardware. CPU clock speed has stopped at 3 GHz, we must learn to use our multicores if we want to evolve from now on.
Re:C and Python complement each other (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C1x [wikipedia.org]
I believe the newest GCC includes some support for some of the features of that standard already (which of the features I can't remember).
Re:C too complex? Hilarious. (Score:5, Insightful)
The vast bulk of your argument is dedicated to defending C, which he never mentioned and only an imbecile would call the core language rules complex.
C++, which you barely mention, on the other hand, is extremely complex at its core, mostly due to its templating language--which, by the way, is one of the very best features of C++, and although it could be (and will be in C++0x (0x more like 2x amirite)) done better, I think the expressiveness is well worth the complexity. Again, only an imbecile would call C++ simple.
The real question to ask when somebody chooses to bash C++, however, is "what are you selling?" In this case, he's fairly up-front about it--he's selling Go, Google's pet language. To that, I say, "I'll believe it when I see it." Right now Go is a bunch of "but just look at the groundwork we've laid down! This will be great when it's done!" As the article mentioned, that may be true, but its complexity will approach C++ as its capabilities do. It's just hard to do a lot of stuff well, and for all the complaining, C++ does do a lot of stuff, and it does most of it well, or at least ... eh, pretty good.
Honestly, look over the C++ challengers: every one I've ever seen that's squarely aimed at taking out other languages is little more than an ego project. I have yet to see a language that actually introduces new capabilities without significant downsides compared to what they're trying to replace, so I'll keep doing what's worked for me the last 10 years I've been a C++ fanboy: wait for something that's actually better to come out. Smugly.
Re:C too complex? Hilarious. (Score:5, Insightful)
C is very much a relevant language with a strong niche for modern use. It's very good at what it does. It is a mid-level language and it shines at that sort of use.
Note that he was complaining specifically about C++, not C. It's not even necessarily the language itself, but the patterns and APIs that are inspired by the language that matter.
When you need a higher level language than C, C++ is NOT a great answer. It's a series of bolt-ons for C that try to make it something it is not.
Meanwhile, java started out badly with silly marketing claims that it never quite lived up to, still manages to perform poorly in practice and has been dogpiled with a bunch of alphabet soup such that if there is a lean and mean language in there somewhere, we'll never find it./
So it's not at all C that is too complex, it's those horrific messes we call programs written in C++ that are too complex.
Do you know who Rob Pike is? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:C too complex? Hilarious. (Score:5, Informative)
You know, nothing pisses me off more than people responding to a post saying only "THIS". Please, keep it to yourself if that's all you can contribute. I feel bad for thewasted bandwidth and computing power that was exhausted on that little brain fart of a post.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:We all know the ideal language has two function (Score:4, Funny)
slowDownAndCrashSoICanSellAnUpgrade();
Re:We all know the ideal language has two function (Score:5, Funny)
You obviously aren't paid by the hour to write java code, or else you'd have come up with something like:
ThreadFactory.getInstance().setExecutionTarget(new Runnable(){ public void run (doWhatIWant() }).addExecutionObserver(ExcecutionItemObserverFactory.getInstance()).start()
Which is much more "enterprise ready" than yours.
Re:We all know the ideal language has two function (Score:5, Insightful)
We have a FoobarFactoryFactory class in the project I'm currently assigned to... yes, it's a factory that creates factories (which in turn create foobars). And the foobars are themselves generic-ish objects which can contain any number of different types of data.
And they have the nerve to tell me one of the qualities of higher-level devs is that "they tend to make things simpler than entry-level devs".
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:python+ objective C (Score:4, Interesting)
I suppose it's worth expanding my polymorphism comment slightly. People who think that objecitve C's Messaging concept is just semantic sugar are not understanding it clearly.
In objective C you don't "call an object method" but rather you pass a message to the object. THe object, if it chooses to reply, does not "return" a value but instead sends back a reply message.
What's the difference? Well in implementation very often nothing. The message that is sent is a message name and a list of calling args and their names. 99.9% of the time the object chooses to resolve this message by finding a method that corresponds to that prototype. So that looks just like C++. But the thing is, it does not have to do that. It could choose to re-interpret the message. And in particular it might use some other recently method added later than "linking" time to the object. Thus how the method calls are bound does not happen at link time. They often are prebound then for efficiency, but they do not have to be. The same is true of the return values.
THis makes it more like java in a way.
But the nice thing is that the overall syntax is just a thin layer on basic C.
Another reason that Objective C is so nice now is that it had a chance to mature and modernize out of the spotlight. Having lived mainly in the apple ecosystem it has a lot of standard libs now with dictionaries and core data tied to persistent storage, MVCs, and so forth that are all (mostly) self consistent and not the tower of babble on finds in java. THings like get-set commands can be handled by decorators rather than explicit coding. That's cool because by letting the compiler pre-processor define what is in a get set you can inherit all sorts of things like listeners binding to your variables that you did not explicitly encode. Just recomoile your code and poof you inherit all the new features.
Complex? Difficult? Since when? (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
umm... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Efficient" languages are too complex. "Simple" languages are too inefficient.
Normally I'd write this off as "duh" but this is Rob Pike.
Oh wait, he's pushing something new that somehow manages to be easy and efficient? OK...
Re:umm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm no Robert Pike, but I imagine that computer programming as we move to thousands and millions of cores will consist less of telling the computer how to do something, and more of telling the computer what you want to do and having a really smart compiler figure out the details. The more low-level you go, the less chance the compiler has of figuring out what you're trying to do and making it work effectively (and do crazy optimizations like speculative out-of-order execution, and what-have-you).
But this
Re:umm... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that means that the programming languages of the future will be subjective: the computer will interpret your commands in the light of whatever other data it has. This, of course, requires artificial intelligence, and slowly but surely phases away the whole job of programming as a separate skill from commanding people.
In other words, the ultimate programming languages of future will be known as English, Chinese, etc.
Re:umm... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not saying that that would be it, but I would not mind a programming environment where the text files have gone the way of the dodo. With Eclipse we use a rather strong "Clean Up" where missing keywords (e.g. final) are added and statements are reformatted (etc.). Wouldn't it be easier to do without that kind of stuff? What about comparing the differences of two branches (or new code with the head) where the actual semantic changes are compared vs lines of text? What about an environment where you can easily hide complexity and meta-information? Or, possibly, add new literals? Where the base of the language is shifted to the Abstract Syntax Tree, not so much the syntax.
Lisp (Score:5, Funny)
What about an environment where you can eathily hide complexity and meta-information? Or, possibly, add new literalth? Where the bathe of the language is shifted to the Abthtract Thyntax Tree, not tho much the thyntax.
Fixed that for you. Programming with abstract syntax trees has been possible since Common Lisp if not earlier.
Missing context... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pike detailed the shortcomings of such languages as a way of describing the goals that he and other Google engineers have for a new programming language they developed, called Go.
Oh, so he's pushing a competing product and denigrating his competition? Nothing to see here, I think.
Re:Missing context... (Score:4, Informative)
"WriteLine()" makes perfect sense in the context of the Console class when paired with its newline-less counterpart, Write(), and is spelled wr[down-arrow][enter]. Four keys. Intellisense (or whatever its equivalent in your preferred IDE is). Use it. Quit inflicting functions like "wrtln" on the rest of us.
If C++'s complexity has him vexed (Score:5, Funny)
I LOVE perl! (Score:5, Funny)
I actually think that perl is the best programming language every designed.
(Waits for storms of laughter to subside)
No, really, I'm completely serious. perl is the English of programming languages. It takes the most useful parts of everything and mixes them all together into a useful conglomerate.
Much the same way you can use English to write a scientific dissertation, a sonnet (in full Billy S mode), or O RLY? perl can be as descriptive and formal or as loose and unbounded as the programmer chooses and it all JUST WORKS!
I **lothe** "bondage and discipline" languages that force me to think and write a certain way just because some would-be language guru thinks HIS way is the One True Path to enlightenment. perl gives me an expressive, more-than-one-way-to-do-it language that lets me think and work the way that best fits the problem at hand.
I have written enterprise-level perl code optimised for long-term maintainability and reliability (an LDAP server replication program that did schema translation). And I have written 5-second hacks that solved an immediate problem quickly and efficiently. perl lets me do this. No other language I've used matches perl's sheer versitility.
I love perl!
And I'm not at all ashamed to admit it.
DG
Re:I LOVE perl! (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually think that perl is the best programming language every designed[...] perl is the English of programming languages.
You went on to describe how Perl is great but just so you know - every one of those reasons you listed is why every multi-lingual person on the planet hates English. It's a pain in the ass to learn because there are too many exceptions to the rules or the rules aren't well defined. Look no further than pluralization. Add an S, in most cases. Oh, but if it ends in an y, make it 'ies', like skies. And for some words, that end in sh or ch or x or something, its 'es', like wrenches. Oh and for Goose, its Geese. But the plural for Moose is not meese, in fact, its just moose, not even mooses.
We won't bother getting into Contractions or prefixes/suffixes or any of the real gritty stuff. English itself is a pain, let alone how many variants of it are across the Earth, with their own Formal, informal, and Slang terminology.
So yeah, while the flexibility that makes Perl accessible to more programming styles is good to you, its still a a pain to learn, and one of the reasons why people are put off by it. Without a standardized way of doing things its difficult to understand exactly whats going on. Some of the most obfuscated code I've ever seen has been written in Perl.
Re:I LOVE perl! (Score:4, Insightful)
English. It's a pain in the ass to learn because there are too many exceptions to the rules or the rules aren't well defined. Look no further than pluralization. Add an S, in most cases. Oh, but if it ends in an y, make it 'ies', like skies.
Unless the word is Monkey, then the plural is Monkeys.
The nice part about the English language is that someone can speak pigeon-English and English speakers understand them very well. All those exceptions teach native-speakers to be accepting of lingual oddities. In some other languages, incorrect verb tense can make the difference between talking about "You" or "She", or incorrect tonality can make a foreigner sound like a stroke victim.
Re:I LOVE perl! (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, English is a very easy language to learn, to a certain degree. It's a lot like learning to play guitar. Any moron can learn to play a few chords on a guitar and make a simple song. However, only really talented people can become true virtuosos of the instrument and play like Joe Satriani or Steve Vai. English is like that: it's easy to learn it to a minimal degree and become somewhat conversant. The words are short and simple, you don't have to worry about silly things like word gender, etc. However, becoming truly fluent in it (so that you can read and write advanced literature, for instance) is difficult and time-consuming because you have to memorize so many things, and learning some Greek and Latin is very useful for understanding many larger words.
Re:I LOVE perl! (Score:4, Informative)
The words are short and simple, you don't have to worry about silly things like word gender, etc.
Yeah, you only have to worry about other silly things, such as learning seemingly endless tables of non-standard plural and past tense forms by rote, or understanding just what the hell perfect tense is about.
English is certainly not the hardest language out there, but it's also not the easiest one, by far.
Re:If C++'s complexity has him vexed (Score:5, Funny)
Since his talk had no discernible structure, said the same thing in a dozen different ways and won't make any sense this time next year, I'd assume he's a fan.
A new phrase for "U.N. Barbie" (Score:5, Funny)
And...? (Score:4, Insightful)
And where is the news here?
Picking the right tool for the job doesn't just cut down half the work time, but can help offset what sloppy workers do to destroy quality.
C++, Java, perl, C, forth, and sh are all different languages, and well suited to different jobs. But when all you have is a nailgun (i.e. all you are fluent in is a single language), every project starts looking like nailgun job, including your own foot.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Anything that a RPN calculator does well at, forth does even better? :-)
Due to the nature of forth, I would say that it's well suited for applications where being modular is a plus, stack space is not at a premium, initialization time is not at a premium, but execution speed from when execution actually starts (not including initialization) is important.
Oh, and where you can take advantage of the extra rope you're given (like with C). That people are able to hang themselves with it is no reason for a hardw
Alternative Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll start using Go as soon as Google makes a browser-based development environment for it, ala Google Documents meets Bespin, and it makes something I can then deploy to servers other than the one running the development environment...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's worth watching.
If Pike thinks the Go language solves anything, he should probably watch this talk too.
443,000 lines of Javascript?? (Score:4, Interesting)
This guy has a lot of nerve telling other folks what programming language to use.
Not a good diplomatic move... (Score:4, Interesting)
You should bash Java, and C++ devs will agree. You should bash C++, and Java devs will agree.
Now you bashed both languages that has probably the most devs. Except some dynamic languages, of course (PHP and JS comes to mind).
Oh, you insulted them, too.
OMG...
Re:Not a good diplomatic move... (Score:4, Funny)
Bad advice!
% bash java /usr/bin/java: /usr/bin/java: cannot execute binary file
"Google Engineer" ... seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about "Rob Pike Decries Complexity of Java, C++" instead?
|Rob Pike| >> |Google Engineer|
Summary: (Score:5, Interesting)
Shorter Rob Pike: all those other languages suck, but the one I invented rocks. It's elegant and simple just like Lisp was back in the sixties!
I'm reminded of this blog [scienceblogs.com] post I read, where the author described it as "The Hurricane Lantern Effect". You look at someone else performing a task, and you think "geez, what an idiot! I can do it better in ten different ways!".
Then they hand the task off to you, and you slowly realize that each of your ten improvements isn't actually any better.
I bet you that if it's still around in ten years, someone else will decry Go 10.0 as being a "bureaucratic programming language".
Re:Summary: (Score:4, Insightful)
Whats better is if you take a look at his history of 'inventions', you find one or two things that eventually, with the help of others, turned into something that other people use.
His personal list of inventions looks like a list of 'things no one gives a shit about'.
His list of Wikipedia quotes are golden. I think there was one on the list that didn't make him look like a total douche.
He's one of those guys that thinks everything sucks except what he's made ... unfortunately, the entire rest of the world feels pretty much the exact opposite.
Looking at his history, I don't think he'll ever say anything bad about Go, he'll just continue thinking it was perfect and that it failed because everyone else wasn't up to the task of using it.
A man after my own heart (Score:5, Insightful)
These sorts of languages (and the underlying religious cults they bring with them) are probably appropriate for some uses. But what I see done in my life-critical real-time processor applications borders on criminal. Data hiding? How the f'ing hell do I check what is going on to the bit level is some twit determined to "hide the data". This is particularly apt right now, because we are adding a feature to our code that was almost trivial to add to our FORTRAN simulations, and because of the "cult of classes" C++ programming it's damn near impossible in the final product, and completely impossible to look at and tell what the heck it's doing. Trying to test it like a black box is never going to get to the level we need.
We started having peer reviews of the code, and my colleagues and I are the designers of the system, so we would hypothetically need to sign off on it. We went for two hours to get 10 lines into it, no one could explain how it was working but that we should just "trust the compiler". That didn't fly with us, so the solution was to *not have us present at the peer reviews* since we were "disruptive"
What we need is someone that can write straightforward procedural code, but no one seem to be willing or able to do it any more. It has all the features of a cult or a secret society, even when you get someone to understand and agree, they won't deviate from their dogma.
Re:A man after my own heart (Score:5, Insightful)
You read the code of the class that the data belongs to. You can be sure that what you read is the only thing going on because no other code can do anything to the data since it's hidden from it.
Well, high-level languages generally make it impossible to figure out what's really going on behind the scenes. That's intentional: abstracting away details is the whole idea of a programming language.
C++ is particularly bad here because it mixes high- and lowe-level abstractions and allows you to redefine basic operations (such assignment, +, etc.). Combine that with manual memory management and lack of bounds checking and you have a rather explosive combination.
We went for two hours to get 10 lines into it, no one could explain how it was working but that we should just "trust the compiler".
If you are using a compiler, you have the choice of either trusting it, or inspecting the machine code it generates by yourself, which is harder than simply writing the damn thing in assembly to begin with, and thus defeats the whole point of using a compiler.
If you want straightforward procedural code, use C. Using C++ for procedural code is pointless, and simply adds unneeded complications.
It could simply be that they disagree with you. Your earlier bit about data hiding making it more difficult to figure out what's going on makes it seem that you don't understand the idea of object-oriented programming, so of course it would seem like a "cult" to you.
It could also be that you're trolling. In that case: bravo sir, you truly have the art down.
News Flash (Score:3, Funny)
Rob Pike likes to program in Forth [wikipedia.org] in his spare time.
Slashdot Interview (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot previously interviewed [slashdot.org] Rob Pike.
Yes. And Go has the same problems (Score:4, Informative)
Go has the same problems. They try to make it 'simpler' but along the way they actually make it more complex.
For example, try-catch-finally idiom is an easy and standard way to deal with exceptions. But no, they had to invent their own half-assed implementation just to be 'minimal'.
Also, they insist on using fucking _return_ _codes_ to indicate errors. WTF? It only makes code more complex because of tons of stupid 'if error' statements.
Personally, I like Rust's ( http://wiki.github.com/graydon/rust/project-faq [github.com] ) design more. At least, it has some new features.
Re:Yes. And Go has the same problems (Score:5, Interesting)
Thank you, I do agree. I was about to write to the authors of Go, but I thought better of it: simply because I cannot see Go go anywhere.
Basically, they do really weird things:
- no exceptions
- half assed immutability concepts
- focus on compile time (compile time? really? yes really!)
- no modularization system (it's like the micro-kernel vs mono-kernel fight all over)
It's got some good ideas that make it interesting for small, fast, secure applications, but not so many that it becomes interesting. I could see technically make some headway for small monolithic kernels. But their market placement is lacking to the point that it is non-existent.
Understatement of the year (Score:5, Informative)
You could at least mention that Rob Pike had a large part in designing Plan 9, a programming language called Limbo, and oh, UTF-8, and that by "he and other Google engineers", TFA means Ken Thompson, who created B (a predecessor to C) and had a part in creating an operating system called Unix.
These two people are the closest thing to a "computer scientist" there probably is, and I'd wager they know quite a lot about programming language design. Pike is known about his feelings towards programming languages like C++.
Rob Pike made a talk about Go and programming language design and makes some interesting points. It's available on youtube [youtube.com].
Re:Understatement of the year (Score:5, Insightful)
Pike and Thompson are not computer scientists, they are practitioners. The difference between Thompson's contributions and Knuth's contributions, for example, illustrate this exact point.
--#
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Which hardly makes them immune from criticism.
In my opinion it makes them more likely to suffer criticism. Many computer scientists, the majority I've met, seem to chronically like in a glass house and are completely disconnected from anything but theory. So if I run with the logical conclusion, in theory, made in a clean room, he's completely right. Pragmatically, almost everything he said likely to be completely wrong.
Oddly enough, seems to more or less cover much of his and the comments and here.
And everyone at Google now speaks Esperanto (Score:5, Insightful)
So Java is complex. C++ is complex. I program in Java for my daily bread and I certainly don't use the entire language. It's only as complex as I need it to be. The complexity of my code is driven by what I'm trying to do, not by the language itself. And for code maintainability, I try to keep things as simple as possible.
C++ and Java make for good foundations (Score:3, Insightful)
Programming is Hard (Score:3, Interesting)
So... we'll end up back at Atari BASIC? (Score:3, Interesting)
I kinda miss those days--easy to learn and embedded 6502 machine code subroutines to make things move faster.
He's just pimping Go (Score:5, Informative)
The summary makes him sound like a winer with no solution. If you read TFA, you see he's pimping Google's new language, Go. That's perfectly understandable since they pay him; but TFA also points out that languages accumulate cruft over time, and Go is a baby.
Re:He's just pimping Go (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, in another 10-20 years, Go will be a clunky piece of cruft, and we'll need a new language, possibly named "Stop".
What's wrong with the main languages (Score:5, Interesting)
The main problems of the major languages are known, but not widely recognized by many programmers.
The killer problems with C today mostly involve lying to the language. "int read(int fd, char* buf, size_t bufl);" is a lie; you're telling the compiler that the function accepts the address of a pointer, while in fact it accepts a reference to an array of char of length "bufl". This lie is the root cause of most buffer overflows. The other big problems with C involve the fact that you have to obsess on who owns what, both for allocation and concurrency locking purposes, yet the language provides no help whatsoever in dealing with those issues.
And that's where we are today.
There are decent languages. (Score:4, Insightful)
The language it was written in was Algol 68. What contributed to my success was an expressive static type system, and garbage collection. Unless you specifically turned run-time checking off, you could not break the run-time system.
Oh, and did I mention that the compiler generated low-level efficient code as well?
But there are few Algol 68 compilers around these days.
Looking to what *is* available nowadays, have a look at Modula 3 [wikipedia.org]. It's not my favourite style of syntax, but programs written in it tend to run fast and be easy to debug. Again, most of the bugproofing lies in the static checking and garbage collection. And it's a systems language. It has been used for implementing OS kernels and the like, as well as application programs. It's my language of choice at the moment. Get the CM3 implementation. Follow the link in the Wikipedia article.
Another attractive language is OCAML. I haven't much experience with it, but it seems to share the behaviour I've grown to love with Algol 68 and Modula 3. If anything, though, OCAML does too much automatic type inference. This leads lazy programmers to forget to mention types at many strategic code locations. making the code unnecessarily obscure.
Did anybody post this yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 Stroustrup
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Did anybody post this yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
How incredibly arrogant. I would totally hire a semiskilled carpenter to put up a tool shed in the back yard. Not so much a NYC high rise. I would also gladly hire an apprentice electrician to put in a new overhead light fixture, but not to wire up my 440v industrial machinery.
There's nothing dangerous about semiskilled programming, providing they are doing work that is appropriate for semiskilled programmers. I'm no more going to hire Thomas Knoll to write my company's Human Resources app than I'm going to personally apply for a job writing the next version of whatever the NYSE is using.
Biased much? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Maybe because programmers like to be clear (Score:4, Insightful)
Big != evil. While M$ uses their clout to squish the competition, [wikipedia.org] bribe the government(s), [slashdot.org] and get away with plenty other unlawful stuff, Google grows mostly by providing a superior product. There is a long way before (if) they become the new M$.
Don't hate on VB (Score:3, Interesting)
Although I mainly do hardware engineering, I also have done/do lots of 8/16/32 bit embedded prorgamming in C and C++. C is a terrific language for embedded. C++ is like a samurai sword, hard to truly master without killing yourself.
I truly loved VB6 as a RAD platform. I wrote a scientific application involving realtime data collection/control, database method and paramter control, realtime graphing, simultaneous multiple system control including sampling robots etc, that is still being used in hundreds of i
Re:Maybe because programmers like to be clear (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Maybe because programmers like to be clear (Score:5, Insightful)
This same rant has apeared generation after generation, and often from peope smart nough to know better. It's why COBOL was invented, with syntax like.
I kid you not, Adm Hopper actually thought that would make programming easier, and she was no moron.
Guess what guys? The reason programming is hard is because you must clearly and unambiguously state what you want to have happen. Yes, the languages could surely be better - the syntax and intricacies of C++ are pretty nightmarish, and Java only fixes some of those issues while introducing others. There's surely a better way to do resource management, and multi-threading, that are less error prone without making you give up needed control. But it's still going to be hard to solve hard problems, and you're still going to need to be very precise and detailed in describing how to solve a problem.
Irreducible complexity is irreducible.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to mention that, no matter what language you use, certain algorithms are going to be inherently complex, and in these areas the "simple" or "true" languages fall flat on their face. I've been coding in one form or another since the mid-1980s, and what I've seen from the "simple" languages is that they might be useful for teaching, but try to write a complex application or solve complex problems, and that simplicity simply makes the code even larger and more awkward.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep, it's like different natural human languages. Some are much simpler than others, and don't have so many cases and tenses and such. However, to express more complex thoughts (such as "he would have liked to go home"), you have to be extremely wordy, whereas with a more complex language, you just use a different verb tense.
Not so sure of that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though for most people that's the first hurdle (and one that they fail), I'm not sure that this is the main reason programming is hard. I know plenty of people who've mastered the basic mechanics of doing that, and yet still don't program too well because they can't make their problem-solving ability scale to larger, more complex problems. You can understand at a fairly low level every single step that will be carried out to execute your program, yet be completely unable to write a large, modular and maintainable software system.
Re:Maybe because programmers like to be clear (Score:5, Interesting)
It's why COBOL was invented, with syntax like.
SUBTRACT DEBIT FROM BALANCE GIVING NEWBALANCE.
I kid you not, Adm Hopper actually thought that would make programming easier, and she was no moron.
COBOL was designed like this so it could be read and understood by corporate auditors and accountants - and for the recruitment and training of accountants as COBOL programmers.
It makes perfect sense when you remember that modern bookkeeping rules are the product of hundreds of years of law and practical experience which the neolithic geek did not have.
Re:Maybe because programmers like to be clear (Score:4, Insightful)
As far as I'm concerned COBOL is the perfect programming language. I'm a little biased as I worked as a COBOL programmer for a time, but you have to admit the syntax is very easy to read.
A well written COBOL program is like reading a little battle plan. It tells you, in plain English, what it intends to do and the ruthlessness of a COBOL compiler forces you to create readable, structured code.
Every COBOL programmer knows where the period is supposed to be. C programmers still haven't figured out where the braces should be. It says a lot about a language when you have decades-long debates about punctuation in your code. It encourages a lack of programming discipline which I feel is the leading reason why software is so buggy today.
Re:Maybe because programmers like to be clear (Score:4, Interesting)
C++ done right with scoped classes doesn't need garbage collection. No, really it doesn't, most people have just never worked with scoped classes, and it's mind-boggling that they don't show up in C++0x (other than the half-useless auto_ptr we've always had). I have a real problem with garbage collection in production code, because it's freaking hard to find and plug resource leaks. If you forget to close a file in a garbage collected language, it will probably get closed eventually when the garbage collector cleans up, but the program likely has some bug anyhow, and the GC has made it a horrible intermittant bug that changes behavior in a lab environment!
C++ has two key abilities that any good language needs, but few have: scoped resoruces (but only in that it allows you to add them yourself!), and const references. Why are people still making high level languages where references aren't const by default?!? In C# I can't (usually) tell from the function signature whether changing an argument will change the caller's copy, nor can I be sure from an interface that a given function won't alter what I pass to it - what insanity is that? (And Java is only slightly better.)
Re:Maybe because programmers like to be clear (Score:5, Interesting)
Nearly everything I was unhappy about in C++ is better in D.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, you can do it the sane way. But my point was that someone actually thought the verbose way was easier to understand!
Re:Maybe because programmers like to be clear (Score:5, Informative)
Should have RTFA I guess, I now realize Mr Pike just talks in circles and really didn't have anything of value to say other than 'programming is hard'.
No, he doesn't. TFA-writer Joab Jackson talks in circles and doesn't have anything of value to say. Mr. Pike, on the other hand, appears to be saying that Google Go fixes a lot of unnecessary complexity in Java and C++.
His keynote isn't linked from either the Slashdot summary or TFA, but can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kj5ApnhPAE [youtube.com]
Re:Maybe because programmers like to be clear (Score:4, Informative)
I'm aware of who he is, what he does now and what he's done in the past. I've now seen his keynote.
My opinion hasn't changed. He has nothing to say and talks himself in circles, I'm guess you just don't see it due to lack of understanding, of course maybe I'm the one that doesn't understand.
Who knows, but I'm going to stick with my original assessment that he's just a blow hard spewing about his latest creation and how everyone elses sucks because his creation some how mysteriously fixes the problem that no one else has.
You go listen to what he has to say, I'll continue getting things done while you go play with a new language because its 'better' until you realize that its exactly the same as all the others.
When you start telling me that the language is the problem I realize instantly that you aren't that great of a programmer. My one exception to this is Visual Basic (not BASIC, VB specifically). It is a shitty environment because of the shit support library MS made for it.
Re:Maybe because programmers like to be clear (Score:5, Insightful)
UTF-8 was one moment of genius insight ("make sure the escape sequences cant be confused with notmal characters"), and the rest was trivial. The details weren't even very well thought through beyond that one clever idea: real standards deal mostly with error handling, and UTF-8 totally dropped the ball on that, leaving RFC 3629 to pick up the slack. If anything, co-inventing UTF-8 is an argument that he doesn't know much about real-world programming (Ken has of course proven himself elsewhere). Being the author of RFC 3629 (F. Yergeau) and cleaning up the mess would make one's opinions much more interesting!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That was figured out _long_ before UTF-8. In fact, having been born in 1956, Rob Pike was probably exposed to the concepts of Control Codes [wikipedia.org] and bisync [wikipedia.org] as well as all the other framing methods that use escape characters to indicate in-band signalling [wikipedia.org].
Have you ever wondered what all those control characters are doing wasting space down there under decimal 32? Link management, that's what. Start of Header, Start of Text, End o
Re:Maybe because programmers like to be clear (Score:4, Interesting)
Even [XYZ]-modem used a similar setup.
Not quite. Xmodem and Ymodem use SOH and STX to denote start of sectors and ACK/NAK, but after that it's just a raw 8-bit file dump to the checksum/crc bytes with no concern for character set encoding. Zmodem uses DLE and escapes out most of the C0 bytes (XON/XOFF and CAN must be escaped regardless of session flags), but doesn't use the rest of the codes for anything.
Most of C0/C1 codes mixed right in with the text for formatting/presentation, e.g. embedding backspaces followed by underscores to get underlined text. Some of the others did link-level too. It was a mess, so much so that parsers for ANSI X3.64 / ECMA-48 style escape sequences take a LOT of work to get right (passing 'vttest' is not trivial).
UTF-8 isn't bad. It specifies that character decoding be done before any other processing including C0/C1 and ANSI escape sequences, which makes it very easy to integrate on the reading side. Harder is dealing with wide chars on the screen and user I/O. Compared to Avatar's repeat character and ANSI fallback features, it's much more bang for the buck. And let's not talk about "ANSI Music" and it's use of SO (Ctrl-N) because it's the "music symbol" in CP437!
(Disclaimer: I've written a console-based terminal emulator [sf.net] that does a decent VT102/220, UTF-8, X/Y/Zmodem/Kermit, and lots of other things.)
Re:If you can't code in C++ you shouldn't code. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like the old saw about asking a Christian, "Is it okay to smoke while praying?" versus "Is it okay to pray while smoking?"
Of course competent programmers should handle C and all that. The point is, however, that the new ground to be discovered will be done by having non-programmers be able to quickly, easily, and accurately practice their craft with the aid of numerical analysis and data processing. It's the difference between doing something in an afternoon and needing to incorporate a company; pitch ideas; apply for grants/labs; &c.
The cynical programmer will say that the easy languages will inevitably allow fuckups. Well, that's true I guess (although isn't it an interesting project to reduce these?), but in any real project there are already several categories of fuckups (often methodological/statistical) which the programmer is, usually, blissfully unaware of, and will screw the data/results on a much grander and more subtle scale.
Here is a great example of an "empowering" language: http://processing.org/ [processing.org] Yeah, a `true programmer' may call it inefficient, but if it allows someone to do what they previously could not even conceive of, isn't this an infinite gain in efficiency?
Re:If you can't code in C++ you shouldn't code. (Score:4, Informative)
I think you'd be amazed at how much some of the world's companies rely on Excel macros.
Re:'Go' doesn't go far enough (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, but if you can't "think like a programmer does", you won't be able to create anything but the most trivial program, ever. The difficulty of programming isn't learning language and syntax, it's "thinking like a programmer does". That's precisely the thing that must be accomplished to write complex software, and that's precisely the thing that is difficult to do for most of the population.
Sorry to disappoint.
Re:objective C (Score:5, Informative)
Objective-C is definitely simpler than C++. A little complexity is creeping in now, especially with Blocks. But overall it adds very little to C.