ESR on post-C landscape

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Tuesday, 14 November 2017 at 06:32:55 UTC, lobo wrote:
> "[snip]...Then came the day we discovered that a person we 
> incautiously gave commit privileges to had fucked up the 
> games’s AI core. It became apparent that I was the only dev on 
> the team not too frightened of that code to go in. And I fixed 
> it all right – took me two weeks of struggle. After which I 
> swore a mighty oath never to go near C++ again. ...[snip]"
>
> Either no one manages SW in his team so that this "bad" dev 
> could run off and to build a monster architecture, which would 
> take weeks, or this guy has no idea how to revert commit.

ESR got famous for his cathedral vs bazaar piece, which IMO was 
basically just a not very insightful allegory over waterfall vs 
evolutionary development models, but since many software 
developers don't know the basics of software development he 
managed to become infamous for it… But I think embracing 
emergence has hurt open source projects more than it has helped 
it. D bears signs of too much emergence too, and is still trying 
correct those «random moves» with DIPs.

ESR states «C is flawed, but it does have one immensely valuable 
property that C++ didn’t keep – if you can mentally model the 
hardware it’s running on, you can easily see all the way down. If 
C++ had actually eliminated C’s flaws (that it, been type-safe 
and memory-safe) giving away that transparency might be a trade 
worth making. As it is, nope.»

I don't think this is true, you can reduce C++ down to the level 
where it is just like C. If he cannot mentally model the hardware 
in C++ that basically just means he has never tried to get there…

I also think he is in denial if he does not see that C++ is 
taking over C. Starting a big project in C today sounds like a 
very bad idea to me.

Actually, one could say that one of the weaknesses of C++ is that 
it limited by a relatively direct mapping to the underlying 
hardware and therefore makes some types of optimization and 
convenient programming harder.

*shrug*