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Linus vs C++, again

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Re: Linus vs C++, again

#51

Post by Daniel_Newby »

This rings hollow. It's like saying "C++ feature X can go horribly wrong when used without adult supervision, therefore C++ is unusable." This is especially silly coming from someone who favors a professional stunt language like C.

If somebody uses too much overloading, reject their patch. If somebody makes a template tarpit, abuses operator(), or gets too fancy with operator overloading, send it back to 'em.

Context dependency bad? I like having the superclass define a contract so that you can ignore which subclass is being used. And C++ even rubs your nose in the name of the superclass, to avoid duck typing (which Python/Ruby use with near impunity anyway).

Polymorphism also gives you what amounts to functional programming without touching C's awful function pointer syntax. I suspect a lot of Linux code uses baroque switch/case or "if" statements just to avoid the pain of function pointers.

Edited.

Re: Linus vs C++, again

#52

Post by portlandFan12 »

huherto wrote: post #44
sliverstorm wrote: post #23

This leaves me with a burning curiosity. Linus, if you could change the Linux kernel to another language, would you? In a perfect world (i.e. migration concerns and such aside), if you were changing the Linux kernel to another language, what language would you choose? If you feel C is still the #1 choice, what would the #2 choice be?

I would like to hear Linus opinion on Go.

Linus gives his opinion on Go later the referenced thread:

http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&...

> Hey, I think Go picked a few good and important things to look at, but I think they called it "experimental" for a reason. I think it looks like they made a lot of reasonable choices.

> But introducing a new language? It's hard. Give it a couple of decades, and see where it is then.

Re: Linus vs C++, again

#53

Post by protomyth »

JustinSeriously wrote: post #37
stcredzero wrote: post #8

That is a huge problem for communication. It immediately makes it much harder to describe things, because you have to give a much bigger context. It's one big reason why I detest things like overloading - not only can you not grep for things, but it makes it much harder to see what a snippet of code really does. I think this is a limitation of our using flat text to program in. So long as our primary means of communi…

I came here to quote that same piece, but for a different purpose. I am in complete agreement with him. I think writing grep-friendly code is a good thing. I do my best to make all my Perl code easily grepped, it just makes debugging infinitely easier.

Would a search tool other than grep change how you write code?

Re: Linus vs C++, again

#54

Post by rpledge »

protomyth wrote: post #50

I know no tool would solve every problem, but I can't help but wondering if someone developed and IDE that truly got C++ would that allow C++ to be used by more projects. Seeing grep referenced for code searches reminds me that grep has no knowledge of the context of anything in a searched file. It almost seems like C is the only choice if you can't go beyond context-less tools. //a grep specifically for C++ code - h…

Are you implying C++ isn't widely used? I'm sure that isn't what you truly believe...

Re: Linus vs C++, again

#55

Post by cageface »

j_baker wrote: post #26
cageface wrote: post #9

As I get older and grumpier I tend to appreciate Linus' point of view more and more. It's easy to get swept up by arguments of the expressiveness of a language, particularly in small examples. However, I think in the long run it's better to have very explicit code. The less jumping around and inference I have to do to figure out what a block of code does the more likely it is that I understand it and that I can quick…

As with most things, there are tradeoffs. If the expressive code was written with a good level of abstraction, it should be pretty straightforward to figure out what it does. Of course, it means that you need to understand those abstractions before you understand the code, and you might have to do more jumping around to figure them out. But in the long run, it makes it much easier to remind yourself how certain featu…

If the expressive code was written with a good level of abstraction, it should be pretty straightforward to figure out what it does. Abstractions are necessary, of course, but they also leak. Good judgment in these issues is one of the hallmarks of an experienced programmer. I'm just finding in my own code that I'm gravitating towards less abstraction, not more.

Clojure in it's current incarnation is a great example of this problem, IMO. It provides a very expressive and highly abstract interface to the JVM and java libraries, but once you hit a stack trace the abstraction comes tumbling down and you have to start picking through the mixed java/clojure stack trace to figure out what went wrong. Throw macros into the mix and things get even hairier. I've found that in some cases it's better to just bang out vanilla java. Sure it takes more LOC to get the same things done, but the result is often dead-easy to understand and debug.

Like everything else in engineering though, it depends a lot on exactly what you're trying to build.

Re: Linus vs C++, again

#56

Post by protomyth »

rpledge wrote: post #54
protomyth wrote: post #50

I know no tool would solve every problem, but I can't help but wondering if someone developed and IDE that truly got C++ would that allow C++ to be used by more projects. Seeing grep referenced for code searches reminds me that grep has no knowledge of the context of anything in a searched file. It almost seems like C is the only choice if you can't go beyond context-less tools. //a grep specifically for C++ code - h…

Are you implying C++ isn't widely used? I'm sure that isn't what you truly believe...

oh no, I know it is widely used (Visual C++ and the ilk). I was more thinking in these huge C open source projects.

Re: Linus vs C++, again

#57

Post by ecaradec »

j_baker wrote: post #2

I actually rather like this quote: Anybody can say "yes". Somebody needs to say "no"

it's interesting to note that open source works in reverse of entreprise where any manager can say no, but only the boss can say yes...

Re: Linus vs C++, again

#59

Post by mkramlich »

huherto wrote: post #44
sliverstorm wrote: post #23

This leaves me with a burning curiosity. Linus, if you could change the Linux kernel to another language, would you? In a perfect world (i.e. migration concerns and such aside), if you were changing the Linux kernel to another language, what language would you choose? If you feel C is still the #1 choice, what would the #2 choice be?

I would like to hear Linus opinion on Go.

Or D.

I had thought D was designed to be, among other things, a reasonable next-generation replacement for projects that would otherwise use something like C.

Re: Linus vs C++, again

#60

Post by martincmartin »

cageface wrote: post #9

As I get older and grumpier I tend to appreciate Linus' point of view more and more. It's easy to get swept up by arguments of the expressiveness of a language, particularly in small examples. However, I think in the long run it's better to have very explicit code. The less jumping around and inference I have to do to figure out what a block of code does the more likely it is that I understand it and that I can quick…

How do you explain the success of ActiveRecord? Do you think it's illusory? The exception that proves the rule? Something else?

http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/07/13/ending-the-...

"The fact that it took decades for the industry to arrive at something as useful as ActiveRecord in Rails is due primarily to the attitude that some language features [in this case, meta-programming] are just too powerful for everyone to use. "

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