All 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
It's not V1 - that one took a Firewire cable, not USB.
The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
51–60 of 152 posts
Re: The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
#52Is 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…
His past C++ projects (or lack thereof) do not tell much about the quality of his books. He teaches people how to master C++, and that's a very precise skill. He doesn't claim to teach how to organize software, or how to manage collaboration between people, or any of the other skills that are necessary for a successful software project. It's the same way that good grammar is only one of the skills involved in writing…
> Some scholars really grok grammar, and are excellent at teaching it, yet they haven't written great novels. I'm thinking of William Strunk Jr (of "The Elements of Style" fame), for example.
Not sure that Strunk, or the successor Strunk and White, are good examples here; they didn't "really grok grammar", in fact, they were pretty bad at both understanding it and teaching it, and their advice consists of a lot of incorrect information and vague platitudes. E. B. White was actually a good writer, but much of his writing violates the prescriptions in The Elements of Style.
Geoff Pullum has a good rant on the subject, if you want more detail: https://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/254...
So, this is exactly why it's an interesting question to test if the suggestions in the "Effective C++" series are actually good suggestions, or are just someone expounding rules that sound good in theory but don't actually help in practice.
Re: The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
To within a disturbingly accurate margin of error I can tell you right now his financial return for this book: zero dollars. There isn't enough money in tech books for writers to rely on it as a day job. At best it'll get you noticed and make other jobs or speaking engagements easier to get.
I am inclined to disbelieve you. I could agree that tech writing in general doesn't pay well, but this is an author who has sold over 150,000 physical copies, in addition to whatever virtual sales (like mine) he's had. Even if his take is 10% for a $30 book, that's still respectable income.
I had no idea where you came up with the "150,000 copies" figure but then I ended up seeing the same thing listed on a page about "More Effective C++", which has been in print for 2 decades. Even if he received $3-4 per copy sold for all those books, that's over a 20 year timespan, that only works out to $20k or so a year, although he does have other books. It's possible that Scott Meyers might be a sufficiently popular author to be able to support himself just on book income at a level comparable to having a decent day job, but at best it's a very close thing and even so he would be one of the extremely rare few who could do so.
Re: The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
#54All 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
Sutter's written that we should use "async" everywhere (even though conventional threads have numerous advantages) and that we should use "auto" everywhere (even to the point of writing "auto x = int{5}" instead of "int x = 5" and "auto foo() -> void" instead of "void foo()"). I'd take his advise with a grain of salt.
Re: The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
#55All 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
Sutter's written that we should use "async" everywhere and that we should use "auto" everywhere, even to the point of writing "auto x = int{5}" instead of "int x = 5" and "auto foo() -> void" instead of "void foo()". I'd take his advise with a grain of salt.
Re: The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
#56I write C++ for a living and I like it, but it bothers me that we need a book that's essentially a list of "you can easily fuck this up by accident, watch out!" for now, it seems that C is insufficiently expressive and everything else is too slow. but the complexity of C++ is troubling.
Everything else isn't too slow, though, especially if you hit any meaningful IO.
Or if you use clever algorithms. I don't have benchmarks at hand, but I suspect that an FFT in Python is faster than a naive Fourier transform in C.
Re: The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
#57I 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?
Remember that that's inluding like 60 pages of what are basically printed man pages.
When K&R was written, it's not a given that the man pages for C functions already existed, is it?
Re: The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
#58When I track my time scrupulously, the results are significantly different than what I thought they would be and also quite different from what, several weeks removed, I remembered re the project.
So, when I read an article that does back of the envelope calculations on time spent, based on rough estimates (20% on other projects, etc.), I find myself suspicious of the computed results.
Re: The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
#59Is 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…
The best coaches are not necessarily the best players.
Like in sport, coaches are good at pointing to particular aspects of someone's game, but were not necessarily great at putting it all together on the field. You find there's different coaches for attacking, defending, etc.
They all tend to have tried playing at some level, however. Even Mourinho was a senior player for a short while.
I suspect programming gurus are no different. They may get very good at shouting RAII or SFINAE at you, without being great at executing it in a large project.
Re: The Time Needed to Write “Effective Modern C++”
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could understand why some people like to avoid exceptions. But constness? Really?
Constness when used on classes introduces a way to create objects that behave differently in different contexts. Are you calling a member function from a const or from a non-const pointer? Depending on that you could be running different code. In my opinion you should make your mind about what the class does: is it mutable? then don't use it with const. Unfortunately, you are still required to use const in many place…
Const-ness gives you a way to express a very common pattern in software, where an object is constructed piecemeal in one section of the code and then "frozen" and only const references get passed around from then on. If you were to express this at the class level, you'd need awkward circumlocutions like the Builder pattern, comments on methods, or friend member functions.