Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes

stroustrup.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 173 posts

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes

#141

Post by GoblinSlayer »

tialaramex wrote: post #73
einpoklum wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I think Bjarne and other C++ magnates have a plan for eating Rust's lunch by allowing for "safe"/"unsafe" within C++.

I mean, sure, Bjarne calls his proposed way forward "safety profiles". Most fundamentally, this completely misunderstands the nature of the problem. This is a technical change, but the most important problem C++ has is cultural. So, they're not even addressing the right problem. In his original talk about this Bjarne even repeatedly describes his approach as a "strategy" which practically begged someone to say "Cultu…

If culture wanted safety strategy in the compiler, wouldn't it need to standardize it?

>There are teams out there already with many years of Rust experience in practice.

They routinely use nightly version, no?

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes

#142

Post by euroderf »

fuzztester wrote: post #118
kmstout wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite: UNIX: % ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o % rm * .o rm: .o: No such file or directory % ls %

Ha ha. And that's not even a newb mistake alone. It's possible even for an expert to maje, by just one accidental space keypress, between the * and the .o, in 2nd command above. Such is Unix.

"rm -I" provides some protection.

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes

#143

Post by jesse__ »

boris wrote: post #132
jesse__ wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree so, so strongly with this. C++ programmers are one of the most religious groups around, eclipsed only recently by the rust community. Try telling a C++ programmer RAII is not a good idea. I dare you. Or smart-pointers. Or that the STL is mostly-garbage.. Trying to honestly have these conversations is typically an exercise in starting a religious flame-war.

I am a C++ programmer and if you told me those things, I would just flip a bozo bit on you and carry on coding, no religious flame-war is warranted.

Point proven

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes

#144

Post by Remnant44 »

boris wrote: post #132
jesse__ wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree so, so strongly with this. C++ programmers are one of the most religious groups around, eclipsed only recently by the rust community. Try telling a C++ programmer RAII is not a good idea. I dare you. Or smart-pointers. Or that the STL is mostly-garbage.. Trying to honestly have these conversations is typically an exercise in starting a religious flame-war.

I am a C++ programmer and if you told me those things, I would just flip a bozo bit on you and carry on coding, no religious flame-war is warranted.

Exactly. Outside of the actual merits of the feature being flamed, someone confidently presenting such an opinion without caveat is unlikely to be worth having a reasonable discussion with.

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes

#145

Post by steveklabnik »

csande17 wrote: post #75
dralley wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only encoding which is compatible with "every operating system in the world" is no enforced encoding at all, and you can do very little "string-like" operations with such a type. Even Python, well-known for being a very usable language, distinguishes between strings (which are unicode, but not utf-8 necessarily) and bytes, which you need to use if you're interacting directly with the OS. The only real difference…

> The only encoding which is compatible with "every operating system in the world" is no enforced encoding at all, and you can do very little "string-like" operations with such a type. People who like "list of Unicode code points" string types in languages like Rust and Python 3 always say this, but I'm never sure what operations they think are enabled by them. In the "bag of bytes that's probably UTF-8" world, you c…

> People who like "list of Unicode code points" string types in languages like Rust and Python 3

Rust and Python 3 have very different string representations. Rust's String is a bunch of UTF-8 encoded bytes. Python 3's String is a sequence of codepoints, and the size changes based on the encoding.

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes

#146

Post by steveklabnik »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #141
tialaramex wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, sure, Bjarne calls his proposed way forward "safety profiles". Most fundamentally, this completely misunderstands the nature of the problem. This is a technical change, but the most important problem C++ has is cultural. So, they're not even addressing the right problem. In his original talk about this Bjarne even repeatedly describes his approach as a "strategy" which practically begged someone to say "Cultu…

If culture wanted safety strategy in the compiler, wouldn't it need to standardize it? >There are teams out there already with many years of Rust experience in practice. They routinely use nightly version, no?

> They routinely use nightly version, no?

Depends on what you mean by "routinely." In 2020, the last year that the annual survey published these numbers, 8.7% of Rust programmers used exclusively nightly. It has been dropping every year.

Some people do occasionally use nightly; at my job, most code is on stable, but there are a few projects that do currently require a couple of nightly specific things.

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes

#147

Post by wizerdrobe »

hardware2win wrote: post #123
closetkantian wrote: post #111

"Nobody should call themselves a professional if they only know one language". Presumably he means programming language, but this may apply more generally.

Thats very bad take. Concepts are above languages.

I would respectively beg to differ.

Getting your hands dirty actively engaged in the practice of building software in multiple languages is needed to get good, diverse sets of experience around what works and why.

Reading books or worse, opinions on HN, just isn’t sufficient to claim a robust and well-rounded resume.

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes

#148

Post by smarks »

jesse__ wrote: post #130
smarks wrote: post #91

“C++ is a language, not a religion.” I swear Stroustrup said this at the beginning of his EE380 (CS Colloquium) talk at Stanford around 1986. At the time we (grad students) were all C programmers and we were sure that C was the best language evar, at least, better than Pascal, which was the language Stanford used for teaching back then. So we all wanted to see this person who had the temerity to claim that he had imp…

I disagree so, so strongly with this. C++ programmers are one of the most religious groups around, eclipsed only recently by the rust community. Try telling a C++ programmer RAII is not a good idea. I dare you. Or smart-pointers. Or that the STL is mostly-garbage.. Trying to honestly have these conversations is typically an exercise in starting a religious flame-war.

Every language has its zealots.

What I like about this quote is that it embodies Stroustrup’s personal attitude. He’s ultimately pragmatic. Nothing can be perfect — including C++ by his own admission. It’s aligned well with his other writings and with his commentary on the quotes page, particularly where he says that he tries not to be rude about other languages.

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes

#149

Post by chubot »

chubot wrote: post #139
hardware2win wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If lang design is so insanely hard, then how C# designers get so many things right?

If basketball is so hard, then how did Michael Jordan score so many points?

Also I pointed out an issue in my comment that C# got wrong, then fixed -- closures created in loops

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes

#150

Post by oneofnine »

neilv wrote: post #59
epolanski wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came to the conclusion that the inverse is true, people tend to love languages they don't use. I used to love Lisp and Racket. But after writing some real programs with other people I realized the idea that every codebase has its own DSL and languages is actually stupid, doesn't scale and hard to maintain. Came to hate Haskell for the very same reason. Every Haskell programmer think he's more clever than others so…

> But after writing some real programs with other people I realized the idea that every codebase has its own DSL and languages is actually stupid, doesn't scale and hard to maintain. Code bases can use DSLs. DSLs should used judiciously. For example, if you need an LALR parser, you'd probably wouldn't code it all by hand, and you'd probably use a DSL. Just like we use libraries judiciously in many languages. (Well, w…

> Is this a problem when Haskell is used professionally by software engineering teams?

Yes, large segments of Haskell culture love complex language features and wild abstractions. Unfortunately that mindset seeps into everyday code because key libraries depend on the complex features.

The Simple Haskell movement (https://www.simplehaskell.org/) tried to develop a pragmatic culture but it fizzled. Back when Simple Haskell was active, it was fun watching advocates of complex, abstract Haskell argue against straightforward programming that normal developers can understand.

Post reply on HN