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C++11 and Boost - Succinct like Python

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Re: C++11 and Boost - Succinct like Python

#31

Post by ajross »

viraptor wrote: post #15
daivd wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstand the purpose of ord. The mp3 metadata uses one byte to encode an integer between 0 and 255, which represents genre. It is not a string.

I did misunderstand it. But then the first point is even stronger. Those two lines are definitely not as short/clean/readable as "str(ord(s[0]))"

No, because they have some extra tokens in the syntax (mostly to deal with strong typing). But they're semantically identical, which I think was the author's point. You declare the data instead of assembling it, and you do it in the same order and in the same manner. There's more typing but the idiom is the same.

This is something that I think a lot of people miss about modern C++. They make the mistake of assuming you still program it using C idioms, when often you don't have to. They assume you have to "manually manage memory" when obvious and simple RAII techniques have basically obsoleted that for probably 90% of cases.

It's just not like that. If you have a problem that is "easy to express" in Python/Perl/Ruby/Javascript it is expressable in essentially the same way in C++.

The gotcha to my mind is more that the C++ environment is unforgiving -- a novice python programmer making a syntax error generally bangs around and gets it to work, maybe with some odd thought errors someone else will have to clean up. A novice C++ programmer is lost until they find an expert to explain the problem. So I don't think web engineers need to worry about losing their jobs to C++ hackers quite yet.

But at the same time, the intuition that C++ is "hard" is mostly wrong. A true expert can solve the same problems the scripting languages do, arriving at essentially equivalent code, in very similar time and with very similar (potentially higher due to typesafety) quality.

Re: C++11 and Boost - Succinct like Python

#32

Post by songgao »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #17
songgao wrote: post #12

Well, I liked C++11 a lot. But now I think I'll replace it with Go whenever possible. I don't really mind so much the verbose syntax. What matters is how difficult it is to write efficient code. I recently rewrote one of my C++ projects(which uses C++11 features and Boost.asio) in Go. It took me half the time, less than 2/3 lines of code compared to the C++ version. This is expected. But most surprisingly, despite th…

Hey, hey my story is like yours. My go-to project (ha) is one that I've written in Boost.asio though it was back when C++11 was still C++-0x, but I also switched to Go for the project and saw gains in how easy it was to write efficient code. To be fair, threading is much easier now, but then again, it's still threading...

It's not essentially threads since multiple goroutines are mapped onto one thread (or more if set). It feels like threading but you could just use it as much as you need since it doesn't bring as much overhead as a thread :-)

Check this out: http://en.munknex.net/2011/12/golang-goroutines-performance....

Re: C++11 and Boost - Succinct like Python

#34

Post by ajross »

Kurtz79 wrote: post #27

It's succint, all right (well, sort of). But Python's major strength is readability, even more than coinciseness, or better, to provide both at the same time. C was born as a terse language, sacrificing readability for coinciseness (the original examples in K&R are incredibly succint, almost elegant, but far from readable). I can't see many improvements in C++ (a language that arguably has worse coinciseness than C,…

I call shenanigans. That's true of simple scripts, I'm sure. But you can't seriously claim to me that you can understand decorator idioms, iterables or list comprehensions without a deep understanding of the language. What you say might have been true for Python c. 1998, it certainly isn't true today.

Broadly: reading code is just hard. It's much harder than writing code. There are no non-trivial codebases that can be considered "easy to read" (if you think there are, then you're fooling yourself), and the choice of language makes only mild difference.

(edit: I'm amused at the multiple people who had to jump in to explain "decorators aren't hard!" instead of responding to my core point. First, I know what a decorator is. Second, no one who isn't a reasonably proficient python programmer is going to have any clue what @classmethod does or why all the old code doesn't break without using it. It's non-standard, language-specific syntax in exactly the same way that an STL iterator is, and the only reason you think one is easy and not the other is because you know Python and not C++.)

Re: C++11 and Boost - Succinct like Python

#35

Post by webreac »

daivd wrote: post #16
songgao wrote: post #12

Well, I liked C++11 a lot. But now I think I'll replace it with Go whenever possible. I don't really mind so much the verbose syntax. What matters is how difficult it is to write efficient code. I recently rewrote one of my C++ projects(which uses C++11 features and Boost.asio) in Go. It took me half the time, less than 2/3 lines of code compared to the C++ version. This is expected. But most surprisingly, despite th…

Go is certainly a fine language. One common instance where I would prefer C++, though, is when you are writing libraries for others to use. A language that runs on a VM can not easily be used as a library inside a language that uses another VM. You cannot easily write a library for Python in Go or vice versa. If you use a VM-less language like C or C++, your work can be used (through various wrappers, like SWIG or th…

If you want libraries for others to use, just use plain C. C libraries are trivial to use in almost all languages (from Ada to Yorick).

Re: C++11 and Boost - Succinct like Python

#36

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

ajross wrote: post #34
Kurtz79 wrote: post #27

It's succint, all right (well, sort of). But Python's major strength is readability, even more than coinciseness, or better, to provide both at the same time. C was born as a terse language, sacrificing readability for coinciseness (the original examples in K&R are incredibly succint, almost elegant, but far from readable). I can't see many improvements in C++ (a language that arguably has worse coinciseness than C,…

I call shenanigans. That's true of simple scripts, I'm sure. But you can't seriously claim to me that you can understand decorator idioms, iterables or list comprehensions without a deep understanding of the language. What you say might have been true for Python c. 1998, it certainly isn't true today. Broadly: reading code is just hard. It's much harder than writing code. There are no non-trivial codebases that can b…

Decorators aren't difficult to understand. It tells you that the function is modified in some way. Iterables and list comprehensions are also easy to read, and I do not have a deep understanding of Python at all.

Re: C++11 and Boost - Succinct like Python

#37

Post by Kurtz79 »

ajross wrote: post #34
Kurtz79 wrote: post #27

It's succint, all right (well, sort of). But Python's major strength is readability, even more than coinciseness, or better, to provide both at the same time. C was born as a terse language, sacrificing readability for coinciseness (the original examples in K&R are incredibly succint, almost elegant, but far from readable). I can't see many improvements in C++ (a language that arguably has worse coinciseness than C,…

I call shenanigans. That's true of simple scripts, I'm sure. But you can't seriously claim to me that you can understand decorator idioms, iterables or list comprehensions without a deep understanding of the language. What you say might have been true for Python c. 1998, it certainly isn't true today. Broadly: reading code is just hard. It's much harder than writing code. There are no non-trivial codebases that can b…

That is a given, I agree.

But a complex program written in C++ (or using advanced C++ constructs) will scale much worse than a Python one, in my opinion.

Re: C++11 and Boost - Succinct like Python

#38

Post by daivd »

talloaktrees wrote: post #29

I know c and python, but not c++. While reading the code section, i totally thought this was a wonderful satire of c++

But that is sort of the point. You should not write C++ like C. If a C-programmer thinks your code is nice and readable, you are not using C++. The C-stuff was just added to lure C-programmers over.

Re: C++11 and Boost - Succinct like Python

#39

Post by [deleted] »

ajross wrote: post #34
Kurtz79 wrote: post #27

It's succint, all right (well, sort of). But Python's major strength is readability, even more than coinciseness, or better, to provide both at the same time. C was born as a terse language, sacrificing readability for coinciseness (the original examples in K&R are incredibly succint, almost elegant, but far from readable). I can't see many improvements in C++ (a language that arguably has worse coinciseness than C,…

I call shenanigans. That's true of simple scripts, I'm sure. But you can't seriously claim to me that you can understand decorator idioms, iterables or list comprehensions without a deep understanding of the language. What you say might have been true for Python c. 1998, it certainly isn't true today. Broadly: reading code is just hard. It's much harder than writing code. There are no non-trivial codebases that can b…

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