From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: davida at pobox.com (David Arnold) Date: Fri, 27 Dec 2019 07:28:27 +1000 Subject: [COFF] What languges would you like to learn? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9DDB7EE9-8E8E-4083-BB36-B15CD784FC3C@pobox.com> C++ is several different languages in one compiler. You can use it as a stricter C, as a C with some syntactic support of ADTs, as C++98-style OO, or as a C++17 style meta-programming system. And I’ve probably missed a few. The resulting complexity requires a lot of discipline to use successfully, especially in a large team. Java competes pretty successfully with the C++98-style OO subset. C11 now competes with the stricter C subset. The C++17 feature set competes with ... LISP, maybe? It’s a pretty clear winner for some application areas. d > On 27 Dec 2019, at 03:58, Bakul Shah wrote: > > You can write “cleaner C++” but you will also need to read, understand & possibly > modify other people’s code. But don’t let the naysayers stop you. You must find > out for yourself! You must speak the native language of the community you want > to be part of. If you deride their local language and proselytize Esperanto, the > natives may not take kindly to you! > >> On Dec 25, 2019, at 9:43 PM, Wesley Parish wrote: >> >> I will admit the modern version reads a lot more cleanly than the >> older versions. They finally got rid of the pretense that a C++ header >> file was the same sort of thing as a C header file. >> >> I tried to learn it back in the nineties with one of the Sams Teach >> Yourself books and Borland's Turbo C++ compiler (before I switched to >> Linux), but at the end I was still as mystified as before. It took >> immersion into Java before I finally got the hang of object >> orientation, and Java's still a lot smaller than C++. >> >> A friend wants me to write some utilities for a C++ project he's got, >> so I figure I may as well help him out. Otherwise I'd be just as happy >> without C++. I'll try to keep the complexity down to the limit >> suggested by the Unix philosophy - a piece of code that does only one >> thing and does it well. :) >> >> Wesley Parish >> >>> On 12/26/19, Larry McVoy wrote: >>>> On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 02:44:06PM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: >>>>>> On Thu, 26 Dec 2019, Wesley Parish wrote: >>>>> >>>>>> I'm thinking of finally learning C++. [...] >>>>> >>>>> C++? That way lies madness :-) I had to teach myself it once (with the >>>>> aid >>>>> of The Book) and was glad to leave it behind. Oh, it was also the >>>>> first OO lang that I'd ever used, which probably didn't help. >>>>> >>>>> I can still read it, bot no way will I go back to writing in it... >>> >>> Amen, brother. Bell Labs did some great things, a lot of great things, >>> but C++ is not one of them. >>> >>> I read the book and wanted to like it, I liked how constructors/destructors >>> stacked, that seemed elegant to me. I wanted that for all the methods and >>> soon found out only allocation/deallocation stacked. That seemed lame. >>> >>> C++ seems to encourage complexity and I hate complexity. I tolerate >>> it when there is no other way, but as my math kids say, if you have the >>> right answer, it is beautiful and simple. Complex is reserved for when >>> you haven't figured it out yet. That's not totally fair, I've written >>> some complex code but I did have the nagging feeling there must be a >>> simpler way. >>> >>> C++ teams are riddled with rules "don't use this, don't use that". It's >>> an interesting language to look at but I'll choose C over C++ every time. >>> You can fake OO in C, Sun did it with vnodes and it worked just fine. I'd >>> rather fake it and have it be simple than have C++ and have it be weird. >>> >>> That might be me just being an old fart but I have yet to have someone >>> I admire tell me I need to use C++. >>> _______________________________________________ >>> COFF mailing list >>> COFF at minnie.tuhs.org >>> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> COFF mailing list >> COFF at minnie.tuhs.org >> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff > > _______________________________________________ > COFF mailing list > COFF at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff