C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 6:00 PM UTC

blub wrote: post #43

pjmlp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy, you must be really young. No parallel in C++?!!!?? That is where EJBs and Spring come from. The enterprise architects that created those kind of designs, were the same ones that on earlier decade were doing them with C++. Apparently micro-services are now a thing, well on the late 90's we had Sun RPC, CORBA, DCOM. All tied together with a cluster distributed transaction management. Sprinkled with code generat…

We should all be thankful that the Java and C# communities have offered a welcoming home to all the architecture astronauts :)

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 6:05 PM UTC

badsectoracula wrote: post #199

pjmlp wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You used Delphi, not Object Pascal. Object Pascal was created by Apple for Lisa and Mac OS, with collaboration from Niklaus Wirth. Borland then adopted it to Turbo Pascal 5.5 for MS-DOS. Turbo Pascal 6.0 and 7.0 for MS-DOS, followed by Turbo Pascal 1.0 and 1.5 for Windows 3.x took up ideas from C++. Borland then rebooted Turbo Pascal with Delphi, but to avoid creating too much confusion among Pascal developers, they…

Nitpick: Borland didn't reboot the object model, they extended it to add the 'class' types, but the 'object' types remained unchanged. The code you wrote works in both Delphi and Free Pascal :-). Object types are used often when you want to allocate objects on the stack or when you want to "embed" objects in other objects/classes (i don't know about Delphi but Free Pascal also extends object types to support newer st…

Post by masklinn » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 6:07 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #97

mikevm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Rust less complicated than C++? I don't use it, but from what I read it seems to be even more complicated, and getting even more so with the myriad of features they are adding each release.

It seems to have many fewer language-level features. No lvalue/rvalue distinction, pointers are not elevated to a language-level feature (only references), only a very limited exception mechanism (panic) that doesn't try to generalize to support general validation (rather general validation is done with Result which is a plain old datatype written in the language, though admittedly it relies on a macro for use - more…

    macro_rules! try {
        ($expr:expr) => (match $expr {
            $crate::result::Result::Ok(val) => val,
            $crate::result::Result::Err(err) => {
                return $crate::result::Result::Err($crate::convert::From::from(err))
            }
        })
    }

Post by AnimalMuppet » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 6:13 PM UTC

yason wrote: post #59

While my pet peeves might be different than the author's I agree that C++ makes you work very hard to keep things simple and produce something that is beautiful. Just "avoid the complexity you don't absolutely need" doesn't really work: some basic things are so fundamentally convoluted that I rather just write idiomatic C because it's simple and doesn't get in my way. I want the language to originate from simple axio…

Post by AnimalMuppet » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 6:17 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #20

foo101 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C++ is a complex language no doubt. But software written in C++ need not be complex. Java, on the other hand, is a simple language. But the kind of unnecessary complexity I have seen in Java-land (EJBs, Spring, etc.) has no parallel in the C++-land. So going by your argument, I would choose C++ over Java to avoid the complexity jump, then profile the app, and if any part's too slow, improve that again in C++.

Oh boy, you must be really young. No parallel in C++?!!!?? That is where EJBs and Spring come from. The enterprise architects that created those kind of designs, were the same ones that on earlier decade were doing them with C++. Apparently micro-services are now a thing, well on the late 90's we had Sun RPC, CORBA, DCOM. All tied together with a cluster distributed transaction management. Sprinkled with code generat…