ESR on post-C landscape

[Ola Fosheim Grostad]

On Thursday, 16 November 2017 at 11:24:09 UTC, codephantom wrote:
> On Thursday, 16 November 2017 at 06:35:30 UTC, Ola Fosheim 
> Grostad wrote:
> Yes, I agree that classes are a powerful modelling primitive, 
> but my point was that Stroustrup made classes the 'primary 
> focus of program design'. Yes, that made it more uniform 
> alright... uniformly more complicated. And why? Because he went 
> on to throw C into the mix, because performance in Simula was 
> so poor, and would not scale. C promised the efficiency and 
> scalability he was after. But an efficient and scalable 'class 
> oriented' language, means complexity was inevitable.

Nah, he is just making excuses. Simula wasn't particularly slow 
as a design, but used a GC similar to the one in D and bounds 
checks on arrays, like D. C++ was just a simple layer over C and 
evolved from that. Had nothing to do with language design, but 
was all about cheap implementation. Initial version of C++ was 
cheap and easy to do.

> I would never say OO itself is a failure. But the idea that is 
> should be the 'primary focus of program design' .. I think that 
> is a failure...and I think that principle is generally accepted 
> these days.

Uhm, no? What do you mean by 'primary focus of program design' 
and in which context?

> If the next C++ doesn't get modules, that'll be the end of 
> it...for sure.

I like namespaces. Flat is generally better when you want 
explicit qualifications.

> Yeah..but into what? It's all those furry gopher toys, 
> t-shirts, and playful colors.. I think that's what's attracting 
> people to Go. Google is the master of advertising afterall. 
> Would work well in a kindergarten. But it makes me want to 
> puke. It's so fake.

It is the runtime and standard library. And stability. Nice for 
smaller web services.

> correct the past. They should be focused on the future. They 
> should have got some experienced younger programmers at google 
> to design a language instead. I bet it wouldn't look anything 
> like Go.

Go isnt exciting and has some short-comings that is surprising, 
but they managed to reach a stable state, which is desirable when 
writing server code. It is this stability that has ensured that 
they could improve on the runtime. ("experienced young 
programmers" is a rather contradictory term, btw :-)