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Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument

scottmeyers.blogspot.com

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Re: Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument

#21

Post by Roboprog »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #18
Roboprog wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like "Wargames", the best way to win is not to play. Between moving from MS to POSIX environments in the 90s, and the "death" of Borland, this left me with few options other than another Faustian deal with Java-land, alas. I'm actually liking Javascript nowadays, though. Especially as more of an FP-capable language than an OOP-mandatory language.

I miss Delphi, it was awesome for rapid GUI development :(

Yeah, I bought a copy, but never really used it. Too much work on unix systems for me by that time. TP for Win and (DOS) TP before that were pretty good, though.

Re: Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument

#22

Post by petters »

johan_larson wrote: post #14
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #13

I've been programming professionally for over 20 years, most of it in C++. I really like developing fast code, and C++ used to be my favorite tool for the job. But the language complexity gets more insane with every revision. It's now at the point where Scott Freakin' Meyers can't figure out the interpretation of a short little chunk of code. I'm now actively looking for gigs in which I can develop high-performance c…

Any sense of where the C++ refugees are heading? Rust? Go?

Go is nice, but not a substitute for C++. https://github.com/nieksand/sortgenerics/blob/master/README....

Re: Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument

#23

Post by Roboprog »

aikah wrote: post #8
shmageggy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My god c++ is atrocious.

C++ is hard. If one sticks to a strict subset it is a nice language. The problem is the code one didn't write. Even the STL is ugly to use. They are trying to fix the language by adding features but it's like Javascript, the old ugly ones are still part of the spec.

The worst part of the JS "enhancements" is trying to make it more like Java, rather than bringing it back to its Lispy + Smalltalky roots.

I guess the assumption nowadays by The Management is that programmers are too stupid to learn anything new delimited by other than curly braces, or learn how to backtrace data flow between functions, rather than debugging by property-setter breakpoint.

Re: Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument

#24

Post by seanwilson »

C++ FAQs are full of massively complex conundrums like this for problems you just don't get in other languages. I used to love learning all these highly specific C++ rules and playing language lawyer when I didn't know any better and thought it was a good use of learning time to become an expert. I've since moved on to languages that weren't full of problems like this that let you just get on with what you're meant to be making. If Scott Meyers can't figure this one out what hope would anyone else?

Re: Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument

#25

Post by TeMPOraL »

seanwilson wrote: post #24

C++ FAQs are full of massively complex conundrums like this for problems you just don't get in other languages. I used to love learning all these highly specific C++ rules and playing language lawyer when I didn't know any better and thought it was a good use of learning time to become an expert. I've since moved on to languages that weren't full of problems like this that let you just get on with what you're meant t…

Haha, same here. I learned C++ as my first real programming language, and I used to like the role of language lawyer at the forums. Still like the role, but now I do appreciate working with simpler (grammar-wise, not feature-wise) languages.

Re: Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument

#26

Post by revelation »

Roboprog wrote: post #17
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #13

I've been programming professionally for over 20 years, most of it in C++. I really like developing fast code, and C++ used to be my favorite tool for the job. But the language complexity gets more insane with every revision. It's now at the point where Scott Freakin' Meyers can't figure out the interpretation of a short little chunk of code. I'm now actively looking for gigs in which I can develop high-performance c…

I would like to thank Mr Meyers for his Effective C++ book, back in the 90s. Said book for me was the tipping point with C++. Having used Borland Pascal-with-Objects, and read about Eiffel, that book confirmed for me, at least, that C++ was a tool of last resort for trying to build on top of existing C code. C++ devs are a hardy breed :-)

I was skimming his most recent book and I got the impression that a large part of it was on pretty much the same esoteric nonsense of various && constructs as this blog post.

The blog post has an excuse, I'm not sure the book does.

Re: Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument

#27

Post by chubot »

johan_larson wrote: post #5

It seems to me C/C++ has always had problems. K&R C had weird stuff like char pointers used to point to anything. And modern C++ has odd complexities like what Scott's article illustrates. Was there ever a Goldilocks moment when C was just right ?

I'm struggling with this too... I'm implementing a shell, and on the one hand I've been looking at ancient C code in bash, dash, zsh, mksh, etc. That's clearly not the right way to do it, with raw strings, pointers, and globals everywhere. It's ridiculously verbose and error prone. All recursive parsers in C seem to use setlongjmp for error handling. They have weird memory management with stack allocated strings and globals too, because memory management in C is such a pain.

I tend to like "C with classes". When I started working at Google, the C++ style was a breath of fresh air over what I had seen in the game industry (this was in 2005, so C++ was in a very different state). It was very much C with classes: no exceptions, no iostreams, no operator overloading, no default copy constructors or assignment, in/out params, etc. (Lately it has been trending toward "modern C++", albeit with custom internal libraries for errors and such)

Then C++ 11 came out -- you really can't do without auto and range for loops. It looks like strongly typed enums are useful, and some STL stuff. For recursive parsers, exceptions instead of setlongjmp seems useful too (setlongjmp doesn't work with destructors AFAIK). I'm scared of R-Value refs and move semantics -- I don't know anything about those.

I guess my point is that it's 2016 and it's hard to know if there was a goldilocks moment. Google was using a restricted dialect of C++03 which I think was pretty great and built a lot of real software, but it's hard to say that C++11 didn't add anything useful.

I'm sure the Google style diverges pretty wildly from Bjarne's new effort of C++ core guidelines, which I need to look into more:

https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html

https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppC...

It seems like the LLVM codebase really knows what it's doing in terms of C++, which makes sense, but honestly it's fairly complex for what I want to do. So I think we are just stuck with all these local dialects, which makes code reuse a problem.

Re: Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument

#28

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #25
seanwilson wrote: post #24

C++ FAQs are full of massively complex conundrums like this for problems you just don't get in other languages. I used to love learning all these highly specific C++ rules and playing language lawyer when I didn't know any better and thought it was a good use of learning time to become an expert. I've since moved on to languages that weren't full of problems like this that let you just get on with what you're meant t…

Haha, same here. I learned C++ as my first real programming language, and I used to like the role of language lawyer at the forums. Still like the role, but now I do appreciate working with simpler (grammar-wise, not feature-wise) languages.

[deleted]

Re: Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument

#29

Post by _lbaq »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #13

I've been programming professionally for over 20 years, most of it in C++. I really like developing fast code, and C++ used to be my favorite tool for the job. But the language complexity gets more insane with every revision. It's now at the point where Scott Freakin' Meyers can't figure out the interpretation of a short little chunk of code. I'm now actively looking for gigs in which I can develop high-performance c…

Same here, I will look at Scala Native, like Scala, but instead of JVM as the target platform, its using LLVM

Re: Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument

#30

Post by pjmlp »

Roboprog wrote: post #4
shmageggy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My god c++ is atrocious.

Like "Wargames", the best way to win is not to play. Between moving from MS to POSIX environments in the 90s, and the "death" of Borland, this left me with few options other than another Faustian deal with Java-land, alas. I'm actually liking Javascript nowadays, though. Especially as more of an FP-capable language than an OOP-mandatory language.

Similar path, I ended up in a mix of JVM and .NET lands, project wise.

I still enjoy using C++ on personal projects, but at work only if there isn't any other way.

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