[9fans] kenc

["Saint Sexburga" <sexburga@gmail.com>]

>If you guys really care about this stuff, you should participate
>in the process, rather than sit on the sidelines and carp about
>what others have done.

Doug

I can understand your annoyance with people who casually dismiss the
enormous amount of unpaid work that people such as yourself put into
standardisation efforts, especially when they include in their number
include such flippantly cocksure know-nothings as Uriel. However,
surely you can sympathise with those of us who feel that they are
drowning in the rising tide of complexity of modern computing
"standards". C99 is the least of our worries, but even here, do you
feel that Dennis Ritchie was entirely wrong in his answer to the
question "Are you satisfied with C99?", when he said, amongst other
things:

"I was satisfied with the 1989/1990 ANSI/ISO standard. The new C99
standard is much bulkier, and though the committee has signaled that
much of their time was spent in resisting feature-suggestions, there
are still plenty of accepted ones to digest. I certainly don't desire
additional ones, and the most obvious reaction is that I wish they had
resisted more firmly" and "Of the new things, restricted pointers
probably are a help; variadic macros and bool are just adornment."

As I say, C99 is the least of our, or at least my, worries. For my
sins, I use C++ in my day job. I can vaguely manage to do this as long
as I ignore the cutting edge work in Stupid Template Tricks (aka
template meta-programming) and the "peer-reviewed" garbage at
www.boost.org - e.g. a 400 page manual for a date-time library that
still doesn't do what I want? Give me a break! But when I see the
exciting new proposals to add yet more garbage to the C++ language and
standard library, I despair. Just look at the Boost thread library,
the basis for the new C++ thread library, written by people who have
apparently never read Hoare's original paper on CSP, written as
recently as 1978, let alone looked at any decent work in concurrent
programming since then.

And in my day job, I also have to use the wonderful SOAP standard. If
you could post a short reply explining what the fuck they are talking
about at http://java.sun.com/webservices I would be really grateful.

Doug, I'm not getting at you, but do you never feel, enough is enough?