The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
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The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
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Re: The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
#2Love the book!
Re: The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
#3All of his books are great - especially the one on STL. Herb Sutter wrote some great C++ books also. On a side note, based on that picture of him sitting at this desk, he is still using iPod V1
Re: The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
#4It's a must have book.
Re: The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
#5Is this guy actually writing C++ programs in the wild? He often presents himself as an apostle in the C++ church, but, I am always surprised that he does not seem to apply his guidelines into any practical project of his.
As a programmer, I'm suspicious when people have opinions and give advice but never showed me more than snippets of code. Like a master tailor that wouldn't sew. How come he gets that much recognition and respect?
I would be much more inclined into accepting advice from someone like, say, Carmack, that has successful projects in C++ under his belt. (Many people consider Doom 3's code beautiful C++, yet, the choices made there are very controversial, and far from "modern".)
I also put Bjarne Stroustrup in the same category.
What do you think?
Re: The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
#6I wonder how long it took Kernighan and Ritchie to write 'The C Programming Language'? Amazon says the 2nd edition (1988) is 272 pages long but looking back, it felt like it was 80 pages :) Going by the OP's math (of the language creator being twice as productive) prolly 4 months?
Re: The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
#7Is this guy actually writing C++ programs in the wild? He often presents himself as an apostle in the C++ church, but, I am always surprised that he does not seem to apply his guidelines into any practical project of his. As a programmer, I'm suspicious when people have opinions and give advice but never showed me more than snippets of code. Like a master tailor that wouldn't sew. How come he gets that much recogniti…
Are you putting Stroutrup in the I'm suspicious of his advice category or the He teaches from experience category?
Re: The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
#8Very interesting to reflect on the amount of time needed to write a technical book on a programming language. If I compare that to amount of time taken to write code (and forgive me for the horrible KLOC metric), I think one could easily average about 300 lines of good C++ code (including tests) per day on a new project -- probably more if you are working alone, but let's keep it conservative. So about 37.5 lines per hour * 1350 hours = ~50KLOC. Say half of it is tests, so that's a medium sized app.
I don't know why, but writing a book seems waaay more effort than churning out ~25 KLOC of tested C++. I guess it is what you are used to...
* 300 lines per day is what I averaged over a multi-year period when I was a C++ programmer. But that was more than a decade ago, so I'm guessing it would take less lines of code with "Effective Modern C++" ;-) (and yes, I measured it for interest sake...)
Re: The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
#9Is this guy actually writing C++ programs in the wild? He often presents himself as an apostle in the C++ church, but, I am always surprised that he does not seem to apply his guidelines into any practical project of his. As a programmer, I'm suspicious when people have opinions and give advice but never showed me more than snippets of code. Like a master tailor that wouldn't sew. How come he gets that much recogniti…
Are you putting Stroutrup in the I'm suspicious of his advice category or the He teaches from experience category?
It would seem from the context of his statement the latter, especially given that he built C++
Re: The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
#10Is this guy actually writing C++ programs in the wild? He often presents himself as an apostle in the C++ church, but, I am always surprised that he does not seem to apply his guidelines into any practical project of his. As a programmer, I'm suspicious when people have opinions and give advice but never showed me more than snippets of code. Like a master tailor that wouldn't sew. How come he gets that much recogniti…
I think some of the most solid and forward thinking advice I've seen and used in my C++ have come from his books.
As for Carmack:
I sort of meandered into C++ with Doom 3 – I was an experienced C programmer with OOP background from NeXT’s Objective-C, so I just started writing C++ without any proper study of usage and idiom. In retrospect, I very much wish I had read Effective C++ and some other material. A couple of the other programmers had prior C++ experience, but they mostly followed the stylistic choices I set.