Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Can you give me an example of a "JS enhancement" you are talking about? Its not that I don't believe you I just am curious. I haven't changed the way I, personally, written Javascript since jQuery came out so I'm not up with the new stuff.
Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument
71–80 of 181 posts
Re: Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument
#72I'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?
Most of them moved to Java twenty years ago.
People who are still programming in C++ today do so either because they like it or because they have no choice.
Re: Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
C was already bad when it was born, comparing with what Burroughs was doing in Burroughs B5000 in 1961, nowadays sold by Unisys ClearPath MCP. Or other similar languages on those days, like Concurrent Pascal on Solo OS (1975). When I learned C in 1993, it seemed quite poor compared to my Turbo Pascal 6.0 type safety and respective language features.
The main advantage of C was that it allowed you to type stuff super fast comparing with Pascal ( {} instead of Begin .. End etc.) and had some very handy shortcuts for often used operations like ()?:, ++, --, += etc. Less verbose language, less need to type syntactic structures. You could basically keep the flow of what is in your mind with the progress on your keyboard and forget about typing it; you were simply ass…
I'd say the two more important advantages were a) the bare-metal view C gave you, down to individual bytes, which was important for systems-level programming, and b) the lack of overhead from things like bounds checking and garbage collection, which was useful on the butt-slow machines in the 70s and 80s.
Re: Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
The blog post was about a possible bug in the syntax/standard itself. I pointed out that all languages have weird edge cases and buggy syntax. If you want to discuss programming languages in general then that is a totally separate discussion. C++ is not in the same class of languages as JS or Ruby, so why would you use them interchangeably? C++ is meant for low level system programming, when performance or size are c…
My comment started with "C++ FAQs are full of massively complex conundrums like this for problems you just don't get in other languages" so I was making a general comment prompted by the article. > C++ is meant for low level system programming, when performance or size are constraints on the problem you're trying to solve. The problem domain itself entails a certain amount of care. Agree with this but my view is you…
IMO, Code golf is an excellent metric. Only someone who masters a language and knows its weird edge cases and obscure syntax can make sense of the answers, or attempt to present an answer themselves. If writing code with minimal bugs is your goal, then you don't need to master the language at all. So, I don't even know what we're arguing about. Looks like we agree on most things. So lemme ask you, can you name books (or courses) that teach C++, and devote a significant chunk (or any) of the material to cover such arcane syntax topics? Yes, C++ is complex, because the underlying hardware is complex - and you want to get as close to the hardware as possible. After all, you're basically signing up to repair and service the car yourself, versus bringing it in at the dealership.
Re: Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any examples? My experience is you will frequently be bitten by undefined behaviour in C++ if you don't know the rules well but this is very rare in other languages. It's rare you're going to get a segfault or the whole program crashing in languages like Python, Java and JavaScript.
Those languages all have heavy runtime environments; if a segfault occurs it's an interpreter bug. Whether the mistakes you can make are a result of "undefined behavior" is a different question whether from the consequences of a mistake are an abrupt termination, or an abrupt termination with a helpful error message.
This is how it works in Ruby.
In the CRuby/MRI interpretter when a segfault happens it calls the #to_s method on the current execution context, to get the some memory address and technical details. Ruby happens to be flexible enough that you can override that method. Then you can call whatever you want and you have effectly "recovered" from a segfault. The parser is totally in an inconsistent state and could crash at any moment for any reason but it works often enough people have done it live in front of audiences for talks.
It is not officially specified that I am aware of that overloading #to_s on anything allows recovering of segfaults it is intended for converting things to_strings.
For more on what I mean start reading the Ruby standard, which was about 1,500 pages last I checked. Then check the C++ standard which is about 3,000 for C++11 and then another 2,500 for the standard library. C++ with its standard library is much smaller than Ruby (in terms of the functionality provided) but has at least 3 times the specificity.
Re: Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
"C with classes". (I'm not joking)
The most reasonable choice, restricting yourself to a subset. I knew C++ lost it when people started writing library code resembling monads.
"When your template system turns out to be Turing-complete, you may have gone too far."
Re: Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'll go from bad to worse; Scala is to Java what C++ is to C; barely anyone understands all constructs in either language. You either know everything or nothing (i.e. you can't understand somebody else's code unless you enforce rules or know the complete language in detail).
I think this comment is fair, but could be misinterpreted. Scala allows you to do the same thing in many different ways, and with operator overloading ... the approach you chose to coding defines almost a 'custom syntax' for a project. Which makes it very hard to read sometimes - you have to infer the 'style' before you can get too far. To be fair - that's a different kind of 'inconvenience' than C++ from C - but the…
Exactly, the "custom syntax" is the problem.
The problem is that Scala seems to attract the same type of thinking as C++, where there is a culture that rewards obscure, bizarre syntax.
I mean, why is it an exclamation mark to send messages to actors in Akka?
I need to write code to get things done. I want to spend minimal time figuring out bizarre operator-overloaded library syntax.
Re: Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument
#78Can someone explain how this "universal" syntax is supposed to be better than the old syntax?
Re: Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've since moved on to languages that weren't full of problems like this I think you mean aren't full of those problems yet . :) There's a lot of nasty corners in C++ but almost all of them are because it effectively has 40 years of wild success. (I say 40 because C++ inherits C's baggage and success.) It's totally reasonable to pick a younger language with fewer warts. Become an expert in it! Be productive! Ship l…
Java is over two decades old and one of the most widely used languages in the world. It has absolutely stood the test of time. While it does has its pain points its nowhere near as terrible as C++ and (in my opinion) is improving with new versions, and honestly, I think its a joy to program in though that might not be a "cool" thing to say. Whereas C++ is a chore to program in. That's my opinion, maybe I'm just too u…
Well, there's not a lot of room for problems to crop up when all one can do is define classes :)
Still, here's a few for you: the design of Cloneable is considered to be a mistake, as are exception specifications. These have real negative consequences. File IO was laughably bad and completely unintuitive needing several classes for the simplest of tasks (perhaps this was fixed more recently, but funny you should mention streams).
Resource management was quite tricky to get right before try-with-resources and it still is if one wants performance. Memory leaks and resource leaks are still possible. Boxing and unboxing. The particularly weak type-erased generics.
Java's saving grace is that it's a very programmer-friendly language. No matter how much one screws up, the worst that's probably gonna happen is a null pointer exception with a nicely formatted stack trace attached. The tooling is top class. All of this means that anybody with a pulse can program in Java and get a mostly working program. It won't be a joy to use, unless one is particularly impressed by classes, methods, interfaces in abundance, class hierarchies and factories.
C++ is not like that. If one doesn't use the safer modern idioms and makes a mistake it will crash (if lucky),or act in weird ways or corrupt something. Sometimes there is no way to avoid dangerous code.
There is no nice stack trace, you have to work for it. Probably have to stare at assembly and work with a fully featured but thoroughly painful to use command line debugger that's twice as old as Java.
But it's powerful and really fast. It lets one design creatively, because it supports more abstraction possibilities. And it's not owned by any corporation, it's an international standard that runs on most platforms.
I understand why people use Java. I use C++ because it's not just a tool that gets the job done, but also a way to challenge myself to make something that requires attention and skill. If I want to, it's me and the machine without framewerks, factories, fancy IDEs, dependency injection, package managers and virtual machines.
Re: Help me sort out the meaning of “{}” as a constructor argument
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those languages all have heavy runtime environments; if a segfault occurs it's an interpreter bug. Whether the mistakes you can make are a result of "undefined behavior" is a different question whether from the consequences of a mistake are an abrupt termination, or an abrupt termination with a helpful error message.
This is how it works in Ruby. In the CRuby/MRI interpretter when a segfault happens it calls the #to_s method on the current execution context, to get the some memory address and technical details. Ruby happens to be flexible enough that you can override that method. Then you can call whatever you want and you have effectly "recovered" from a segfault. The parser is totally in an inconsistent state and could crash at…
Interesting post. Small comment: the C++11 standard has about 1300 pages, not 5500, thank goodness.