Quoted post unavailable.
Fully agree, without people like her the committee only gets poorer.
Wrapping Up 2021. Leaving C++
101–110 of 251 posts
Re: Wrapping Up 2021. Leaving C++
#102Quoted post unavailable.
I read the whole article before posting my comment (which is currently top voted, at least it looks like that to me, so maybe that's what you're objecting to). It's quite possible I've missed something, or a lot of things, but your comment isn't helpful determining that... You just said to read the whole thing again. Ok, but what specifically have I got wrong?
Re: Wrapping Up 2021. Leaving C++
#103> I discovered that I not only have OCD but OCPD, a personality disorder. If you’ve ever had a conversation with me where I just couldn’t let something go because it was wrong or incorrect and it bothered me, now you know why. Sounds like about half of the people on internet fora.
The author of the article also sounds like the sort of individual or clique who derail Stack Overflow posts because they feel the premise of the question is wrong (leaving both the original asker and any later reader with their actual problem still unsolved).
Imagine for a moment what SO's signal:noise ratio would look like if people didn't set some sort of bar for quality?
Re: Wrapping Up 2021. Leaving C++
#104[flagged]
Imagine realizing you wasted a decade of your life in the false hope of making a difference, but couldn’t because of a dysfunctional community dynamic… I can’t because I haven’t done that, and perhaps you can’t either. It may read this way to you but that’s the nature of blogs. They’re public diaries. Narcissism is often part of the medium itself.
The problem is she had specific ideas of what would make C++ better, and when 500 smart people are in the room there will be people who disagree. I've seen a lot of what I thought were good ideas get shot down when someone else brought out an objection I hadn't though of. Sometimes someone listens to the objection, spends a couple years of rework, and the process repeats a few times until the objections are satisfied, or at least the majority agree they are worth ignoring. This is not easy, but it is a required part of making them useful. Anything else just adds more inconsistencies until C++ is completely unusable.
Many people cannot handle it and think it is the C++ community being obstructionist when in fact it is just that we all have different needs, the only thing in common is we need a language that we can use for our problem so you better not mess that up.
Re: Wrapping Up 2021. Leaving C++
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. It's the ecosystem and the rest of the frameworks that you'll need to learn, and those will be specific to what you will be trying to do. If you are a proficient c++ programmer you'll have no problem with anything that came after it as those languages usually strive to fix problems in c++. If you don't know web stuff you should learn web. There was a time I would say every programm…
C knowledge is still way more generally useful than javascript and/or web knowledge. Whatever you think of C there's no denying it's everywhere and understanding it is relevant in pretty much every software system in existence, even when that's not immediately obvious.
> C knowledge is still way more generally useful than javascript and/or web knowledge
"Generally useful" is a vague concept. If you judge by number of job openings, you'll probably find JavaScript is more useful. There are probably metrics by which C is more useful.
"Being everywhere" is not necessarily a good measure of the upside one can get by learning it. For example, electronics are also everywhere (more so than C!) but software engineering is generally a better career (measured by income f.i)
Re: Wrapping Up 2021. Leaving C++
#106Consider it an opportunity to branch out to new languages and new ways of thinking. It's good to take a step out to fresh air and take off the reality distortion field helmet that goes with any community of people invested in a particular way of doing things--and I mean that in a broad way, not just technology. I spent close to a decade doing and thinking about things primarily from a JVM-centric point of view. I wro…
The author didn't simply just write C++. Their frustrations come from contributing to it. Please read the article next time.
I did read the article. Language committees are particularly intense concentrations of conflicting reality distortion fields.
Re: Wrapping Up 2021. Leaving C++
#107Quoted post unavailable.
Oh, if I were invested in C++ I would be worried! And it sounds like the committee members should have some takeaways, for sure.
But I'm not a member of that community. Bringing up one problem (C++ committee interaction) doesn't mean that is the only problem that was brought up.
She has trouble communicating because she's very scrupulous, same as lots of other engineers - some people are responding to that problem.
She wants another language that fits her criteria - some people are responding to that problem.
Re: Wrapping Up 2021. Leaving C++
#108> A lack of default arguments, a lack of basic arity overloading, a lack of variadic generics, all make me not want to write Rust. I'm sorry but these are such superficial problems. I don't need overloading (arity or otherwise) since Rust kind of has overloading thanks to the traits. Variadic generics might be necessary since C++ doesn't have a good macro system. But Rust does so you achieve it that way.
Rust has an abysmal macro system that cannot be properly tooled for.
Re: Wrapping Up 2021. Leaving C++
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
C++ is not going away in the foreseeable future, like it or not.
This is like telling green energy advocates that oil isn’t going away. Everyone knows already. When engaging people consider not assuming maximum naïveté
Comparing C++ to fossil fuels and Rust to green energy is the most Rust thing ever.
Green energy as a jihad is understandable, if maybe counter-productive at times. Rust as jihad makes no sense to me. It’s nifty: exposing mainstream programmers to the Maybe monad, and limited type classes, and cheap (not free!) bounds/use-after-free/double-delete checking is cool. Web browsers and HTTP servers and sshd servers and maybe even shells should probably be written in Rust.
But a sense of safety coming from rustc is easy to over-indulge in: lots of really scary attacks are perfectly possible against Rust programs. It kills 90’s-style stack smashes dead, no doubt and in that sense it’s an improvement, but people get pwned lots of interesting ways now, and there will be a headline CVE in a rust program, count on it.
Re: Wrapping Up 2021. Leaving C++
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine realizing you wasted a decade of your life in the false hope of making a difference, but couldn’t because of a dysfunctional community dynamic… I can’t because I haven’t done that, and perhaps you can’t either. It may read this way to you but that’s the nature of blogs. They’re public diaries. Narcissism is often part of the medium itself.
I don't usually see many blogs like that. The best authors with the most knowledge and experience also tend to be the most humble.
Completely agreed, but sometimes blog posts by ordinary writers end up on the front page here, and it’d be good to consider that maybe they weren’t expecting tens of thousands of people would read it. In this case I think it pays to cut the author some slack and sympathize a bit.
The author has clearly had a rough time, and there’s no need for an internet pile-on. At the very least it’s not constructive and needlessly personal to label the author a narcissist as in the top level comment I’m responding to.