The truth about c++ ... or maybe not

[Bill Horne]

Guys,

ROTFLMAO.  It HAS to be true.  Really, think about it.  It's the
only thing that makes sense...

Bill Horne

-------- Original Message --------
From: "Suki L. McDonough" <macwiz at clearspring.com>
Subject: Fwd: Thought you'd like this a lot (fwd)
To: bhorne at banet.net

A giggle from the archives, for your amusement.

>Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 08:35:08 -0800 (PST)
>
>It's a little early for April Fools', but here it is.  The truth will always
>be revealed in the end.  :-)
>
>(Personally, I've always suspected this was the case...)
>
>John
>
>Fyodor writes:
>>  From toad.com!cypherpunks-errors Wed Mar 25 21:53:03 1998 remote from n7kbt
>>  Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 09:56:11 -0500 (GMT+5)
>>  From: Fyodor <fygrave at freenet.bishkek.su>
>  > Reply-To: fygrave at usa.net
>  >
>>  Heh... Wanna hear the C++ creator thoughts regarding the malevolent
>>  creation, he made?:-)
>>
>>  =========/qoute/=======================/quote/====================
>>  [snip snip]
>>  Date: Mon, 09 Feb 1998 23:31:02 -0800
>>  Subject: Stroustrup's interview leaked...
>>
>>  On the 1st of January, 1998, Bjarne Stroustrup gave an interview
>>  to the IEEE's 'Computer' magazine.
>>
>>  Naturally, the editors thought he would be giving a retrospective
>>  view of seven years of object-oriented design, using the language
>>  he created.
>>
>>  By the end of the interview, the interviewer got more than he had
>>  bargained for and, subsequently, the editor decided to suppress
>>  its contents, 'for the good of the industry' but, as with many of
>>  these things, there was a leak.
>>
>>  Here is a complete transcript of what was said, unedited, and
>>  unrehearsed, so it isn't as neat as planned interviews.
>>  You will find it interesting...
>>  __________________________________________________________________
>>  Interviewer:  Well, it's been a few years since you changed the
>>  world of software design, how does it feel, looking back?
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Actually, I was thinking about those days, just
>>  before you arrived. Do you remember?  Everyone was writing 'C'
>>  and, the trouble was, they were pretty damn good at it.
>>  were turning out competent - I stress the word 'competent'
>>  graduates at a phenomenal rate. That's what caused the problem.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  Problem?
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Yes, problem. Remember when everyone wrote Cobol?
>>
>>  Interviewer:  Of course, I did too
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Well, in the beginning, these guys were like
>>  demi-gods. Their salaries were high, and they were treated like
>>  royalty.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  Those were the days, eh?
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Right. So what happened?  IBM got sick of it, and
>>  invested millions in training programmers, till they were a dime
>>  a dozen.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  That's why I got out. Salaries dropped within a
>>  year, to the point where being a journalist actually paid
>>  better.
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Exactly. Well, the same happened with 'C' programmers.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  I see, but what's the point?
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I
>>  thought of this little scheme, which would redress the
>>  balance a little. I thought 'I wonder what would happen, if
>>  there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn,
>>  that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with
>>  programmers?  Actually, I got some of the ideas from X10,
>>  you know, X windows. That was such a bitch of a graphics
>>  system, that it only just ran on those Sun 3/60 things.
>>  They had all the ingredients for what I wanted. A really
>>  ridiculously complex syntax, obscure functions, and
>>  pseudo-OO structure. Even now, nobody writes raw X-windows
>>  code. Motif is the only way to go if you want to retain
>>  your sanity.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  You're kidding...?
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Not a bit of it. In fact, there was another problem.
>>  Unix was written in 'C', which meant that any 'C' programmer
>>  could very easily become a systems programmer. Remember
>>  what a mainframe systems programmer used to earn?
>>
>>  Interviewer:  You bet I do, that's what I used to do.
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  OK, so this new language had to divorce itself from
>>  Unix, by hiding all the system calls that bound the two
>>  together so nicely. This would enable guys who only knew
>>  about DOS to earn a decent living too.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  I don't believe you said that...
>  >
>>  Stroustrup:  Well, it's been long enough, now, and I believe most
>>  people have figured out for themselves that C++ is a waste
>>  of time but, I must say, it's taken them a lot longer than I
>>  thought it would.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  So how exactly did you do it?
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  It was only supposed to be a joke, I never thought
>>  people would take the book seriously. Anyone with half a
>>  brain can see that object-oriented programming is
>>  counter-intuitive, illogical and inefficient.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  What?
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  And as for 're-useable code' - when did you ever hear
>>  of a company re-using its code?
>>
>>  Interviewer:  Well, never, actually, but...
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  There you are then. Mind you, a few tried, in the
>>  early days. There was this Oregon company - Mentor
>>  Graphics, I think they were called - really caught a cold
>>  trying to rewrite everything in C++ in about '90 or '91. I
>>  felt sorry for them really, but I thought people would
>>  learn from their mistakes.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  Obviously, they didn't?
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Not in the slightest. Trouble is, most companies
>>  hush-up all their major blunders, and explaining a $30
>>  million loss to the shareholders would have been
>>  difficult. Give them their due, though, they made it work in the end.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  They did?  Well, there you are then, it proves O-O
>>  works.
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Well, almost. The executable was so huge, it took
>>  five minutes to load, on an HP workstation, with 128MB of
>>  RAM. Then it ran like treacle. Actually, I thought this
>>  would be a major stumbling-block, and I'd get found out
>>  within a week, but nobody cared. Sun and HP were only too
>>  glad to sell enormously powerful boxes, with huge resources
>>  just to run trivial programs. You know, when we had our
>>  first C++ compiler, at AT&T, I compiled 'Hello World', and
>>  couldn't believe the size of the executable. 2.1MB
>>
>>  Interviewer:  What?  Well, compilers have come a long way, since
>>  then.
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  They have?  Try it on the latest version of g++ - you
>>  won't get much change out of half a megabyte. Also, there
>>  are several quite recent examples for you, from all over the
>>  world. British Telecom had a major disaster on their hands
>>  but, luckily, managed to scrap the whole thing and start
>>  again. They were luckier than Australian Telecom. Now I
>>  hear that Siemens is building a dinosaur, and getting more
>>  and more worried as the size of the hardware gets bigger, to
>>  accommodate the executables. Isn't multiple inheritance a joy?
>>
>>  Interviewer:  Yes, but C++ is basically a sound language.
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  You really believe that, don't you?  Have you ever sat
>>  down and worked on a C++ project?  Here's what happens:
>>  First, I've put in enough pitfalls to make sure that only
>>  the most trivial projects will work first time. Take
>>  operator overloading. At the end of the project, almost
>>  every module has it, usually, because guys feel they really
>>  should do it, as it was in their training course. The same
>>  operator then means something totally different in every
>>  module. Try pulling that lot together, when you have a
>>  hundred or so modules. And as for data hiding. God, I
>>  sometimes can't help laughing when I hear about the problems
>>  companies have making their modules talk to each other. I
>>  think the word 'synergistic' was specially invented to twist
>>  the knife in a project manager's ribs.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  I have to say, I'm beginning to be quite appalled at
>>  all this. You say you did it to raise programmers' salaries?
>>  That's obscene.
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Not really. Everyone has a choice. I didn't expect
>>  the thing to get so much out of hand. Anyway, I basically
>>  succeeded. C++ is dying off now, but programmers still get
>>  high salaries - especially those poor devils who have to
>>  maintain all this crap. You do realize, it's impossible to
>>  maintain a large C++ software module if you didn't actually
>>  write it?
>>
>>  Interviewer:  How come?
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  You are out of touch, aren't you?  Remember the
>>  typedef?
>>
>>  Interviewer:  Yes, of course.
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Remember how long it took to grope through the header
>  > files only to find that 'RoofRaised' was a double precision
>>  number?  Well, imagine how long it takes to find all the
>>  implicit typedefs in all the Classes in a major project.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  So how do you reckon you've succeeded?
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Remember the length of the average-sized 'C' project?
>>  About 6 months. Not nearly long enough for a guy with a
>>  wife and kids to earn enough to have a decent standard of
>>  living. Take the same project, design it in C++ and what do
>>  you get?  I'll tell you. One to two years. Isn't that
>>  great?  All that job security, just through one mistake of
>>  judgement. And another thing. The universities haven't
>>  been teaching 'C' for such a long time, there's now a
>>  shortage of decent 'C' programmers. Especially those who
>>  know anything about Unix systems programming. How many guys
>>  would know what to do with 'malloc', when they've used 'new'
>>  all these years - and never bothered to check the return
>>  code. In fact, most C++ programmers throw away their return
>>  codes. Whatever happened to good ol' '-1'?  At least you
>>  knew you had an error, without bogging the thing down in all
>>  that 'throw' 'catch' 'try' stuff.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  But, surely, inheritance does save a lot of time?
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Does it?  Have you ever noticed the difference
>>  between a 'C' project plan, and a C++ project plan?  The planning
>>  stage for a C++ project is three times as long. Precisely
>>  to make sure that everything which should be inherited is,
>>  and what shouldn't isn't. Then, they still get it wrong.
>>  Whoever heard of memory leaks in a 'C' program?  Now
>>  finding them is a major industry. Most companies give up, and send
>>  the product out, knowing it leaks like a sieve, simply to
>>  avoid the expense of tracking them all down.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  There are tools...
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Most of which were written in C++.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  If we publish this, you'll probably get lynched, you
>>  do realize that?
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  I doubt it. As I said, C++ is way past its peak now,
>>  and no company in its right mind would start a C++ project
>>  without a pilot trial. That should convince them that it's
>>  the road to disaster. If not, they deserve all they get.
>>  You know, I tried to convince Dennis Ritchie to rewrite Unix in
>>  C++.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  Oh my God. What did he say?
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Well, luckily, he has a good sense of humor. I think
>>  both he and Brian figured out what I was doing, in the early
>>  days, but never let on. He said he'd help me write a C++
>>  version of DOS, if I was interested.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  Were you?
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Actually, I did write DOS in C++, I'll give you a
>>  demo when we're through. I have it running on a Sparc 20 in the
>>  computer room. Goes like a rocket on 4 CPU's, and only
>>  takes up 70 megs of disk.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  What's it like on a PC?
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Now you're kidding. Haven't you ever seen Windows
>>  '95? I think of that as my biggest success. Nearly blew the
>>  game before I was ready, though.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  You know, that idea of a Unix++ has really got me
>>  thinking. Somewhere out there, there's a guy going to try it.
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Not after they read this interview..
>>
>>  Interviewer:  I'm sorry, but I don't see us being able to publish
>>  any of this.
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  But it's the story of the century. I only want to be
>>  remembered by my fellow programmers, for what I've done
>>  for them. You know how much a C++ guy can get these days?
>>
>>  Interviewer:  Last I heard, a really top guy is worth $70 - $80 an
>>  hour.
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  See?  And I bet he earns it. Keeping track of all the
>>  gotchas I put into C++ is no easy job. And, as I said
>>  before, every C++ programmer feels bound by some mystic
>>  promise to use every damn element of the language on every
>>  project. Actually, that really annoys me sometimes, even
>>  though it serves my original purpose. I almost like the
>>  language after all this time.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  You mean you didn't before?
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Hated it. It even looks clumsy, don't you agree?  But
>>  when the book royalties started to come in... well, you get the picture.
>  >
>>  Interviewer:  Just a minute. What about references?  You must
>>  admit, you improved on 'C' pointers.
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Hmm. I've always wondered about that. Originally, I
>>  thought I had. Then, one day I was discussing this with a
>>  guy who'd written C++ from the beginning. He said he could
>>  never remember whether his variables were referenced or
>>  dereferenced, so he always used pointers. He said the
>>  little asterisk always reminded him.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  Well, at this point, I usually say 'thank you very
>>  much' but it hardly seems adequate.
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Promise me you'll publish this. My conscience is
>>  getting the better of me these days.
>>
>>  Interviewer:  I'll let you know, but I think I know what my editor
>>  will say.
>>
>>  Stroustrup:  Who'd believe it anyway?  Although, can you send me a
>>  copy of that tape?
>>
>>  Interviewer:  I can do that.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>--
>John Opalko				Clear Spring Associates, Ltd.
>john at clearspring.com			Yamhill, Oregon, USA
>
>		    http://www.clearspring.com/

-- 
Suki L. McDonough of MacWizard!
(macwiz at clearspring.com)

"Put some magic in your Mac!"
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