C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)
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C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)
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Re: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)
#2It takes balls to imply that one may use Java in lieu of C++ so as to reduce complexity.
Re: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)
#3In my experience this disease afflicts more than just some C++ programmers, the immaturity is boundless. I’ve noticed some colleagues even think there must be something wrong if code looks simple.
Re: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)
#4Yes, C++ is a complex language. Yes, it has a ton of warts if you know where to look. But, you can write beautiful software with it, and it can even look beautiful too.
Yes, there are alternatives, but when it comes to performance, expressiveness and actual deployability, C++ is pretty awesome.
Re: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)
#5It seems like this article is essentially complaining about the language giving you too much control (e.g. in his copy assignment operator example), when that's exactly what its goal is.
Re: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)
#6Yes, C++ is a complex language. Yes, it has a ton of warts if you know where to look. But, you can write beautiful software with it, and it can even look beautiful too. Yes, there are alternatives, but when it comes to performance, expressiveness and actual deployability, C++ is pretty awesome.
Meh. The performance is almost never worth the huge complexity jump. Instead, profile an app in a higher level language and if any part's too slow, implement that in C/C++. That'll quite often be a low, single digit percentage of the app. Get the performance for substantially less engineering/maintenance cost.
Re: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)
#7Yes, C++ is a complex language. Yes, it has a ton of warts if you know where to look. But, you can write beautiful software with it, and it can even look beautiful too. Yes, there are alternatives, but when it comes to performance, expressiveness and actual deployability, C++ is pretty awesome.
Meh. The performance is almost never worth the huge complexity jump. Instead, profile an app in a higher level language and if any part's too slow, implement that in C/C++. That'll quite often be a low, single digit percentage of the app. Get the performance for substantially less engineering/maintenance cost.
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++.
Re: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)
#8Yes, C++ is a complex language. Yes, it has a ton of warts if you know where to look. But, you can write beautiful software with it, and it can even look beautiful too. Yes, there are alternatives, but when it comes to performance, expressiveness and actual deployability, C++ is pretty awesome.
Meh. The performance is almost never worth the huge complexity jump. Instead, profile an app in a higher level language and if any part's too slow, implement that in C/C++. That'll quite often be a low, single digit percentage of the app. Get the performance for substantially less engineering/maintenance cost.
That only works if the surface area to volume ratio of the heavy lifting parts is low. If it isn't, you'll spend all your machine cycles crossing the bridge and human cycles maintaining the bridge rather than getting work done on either side.
Re: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)
#9There are two kinds of developments:
1. Application level: Typically manipulating lots of strings and data massaging. I prefer Java or python for this. The IDEs and eco-system just is so much faster to start with
2. Systems level: Typically a high-performance system like a DB manager or a fast processing library like a message producer etc. These things are time critical and need performance.
I used to really love C++ but I agree, it takes far too long just to start making things run. Sigh!
Re: C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meh. The performance is almost never worth the huge complexity jump. Instead, profile an app in a higher level language and if any part's too slow, implement that in C/C++. That'll quite often be a low, single digit percentage of the app. Get the performance for substantially less engineering/maintenance cost.
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++.
Either you are confusing verbosity with complexity or you have never actually written a "complex" software in C++. There are too many things to think about while writing a piece of code in C++, most often than not, you are bound to get things wrong.