“C++ in Coders at Work”, 2009-10-16 (; backlinks):
…Joshua Bloch, who also hacked low level C code for many years before becoming a big-time Java head, told me that he didn’t get into object-oriented programming until quite late: “Java was the first object-oriented language I used with any seriousness, in part because I couldn’t exactly bring myself to use C++.” He echoed Zawinski’s point about how C++ forces programmers to subset the language:
I think C++ was pushed well beyond its complexity threshold and yet there are a lot of people programming it. But what you do is you force people to subset it. So almost every shop that I know of that uses C++ says, “Yes, we’re using C++ but we’re not doing multiple-implementation inheritance and we’re not using operator overloading.” There are just a bunch of features that you’re not going to use because the complexity of the resulting code is too high. And I don’t think it’s good when you have to start doing that. You lose this programmer portability where everyone can read everyone else’s code, which I think is such a good thing.
…Ken Thompson, who still mostly uses C despite working at Google which is largely a C++ shop, has had as long an exposure to C++ as just about anyone, having worked with Bjarne Stroustrup, C++’s inventor, at Bell Labs:
I would try out the language as it was being developed and make comments on it. It was part of the work atmosphere there. And you’d write something and then the next day it wouldn’t work because the language changed. It was very unstable for a very long period of time. At some point I said, no, no more.
In an interview I said exactly that, that I didn’t use it just because it wouldn’t stay still for two days in a row. When Stroustrup read the interview he came screaming into my room about how I was undermining him and what I said mattered and I said it was a bad language. I never said it was a bad language. On and on and on. Since then I kind of avoid that kind of stuff.
At that point in the interview I almost changed the topic. Luckily I took one more try at asking for his actual opinion of C++. His reply:
It certainly has its good points. But by and large I think it’s a bad language. It does a lot of things half well and it’s just a garbage heap of ideas that are mutually exclusive. Everybody I know, whether it’s personal or corporate, selects a subset and these subsets are different. So it’s not a good language to transport an algorithm—to say, “I wrote it; here, take it.” It’s way too big, way too complex. And it’s obviously built by a committee.
Stroustrup campaigned for years and years and years, way beyond any sort of technical contributions he made to the language, to get it adopted and used. And he sort of ran all the standards committees with a whip and a chair. And he said “no” to no one. He put every feature in that language that ever existed. It wasn’t cleanly designed—it was just the union of everything that came along. And I think it suffered drastically from that.
…And finally Guy Steele, who probably knows more about more languages than anyone I interviewed (or possibly anyone, period), has also not been drawn to C++. But he did go out of his way to try to say something nice about Stroustrup’s effort:
I have not been attracted to C++. I have written some C++ code. Anything I think I might want to write in C++ now could be done about as well and more easily in Java. Unless efficiency were the primary concern.
But I don’t want to be seen as a detractor of Bjarne Stroustrup’s effort. He set himself up a particular goal, which was to make an object-oriented language that would be fully backwards-compatible with C. That was a difficult task to set himself. And given that constraint, I think he came up with an admirable design and it has held up well. But given the kinds of goals that I have in programming, I think the decision to be backwards-compatible with C is a fatal flaw. It’s just a set of difficulties that can’t be overcome.
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