ESR on post-C landscape

[Patrick Schluter]

On Tuesday, 14 November 2017 at 09:43:07 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> 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…

The shear amount of inscrutable cruft and rules, plus the moving 
target of continuously changing semantics an order or two of 
magnitude bigger than C added to the fact that you still need to 
know C's gotchas, makes it one or two order of magnitude more 
difficult to mental model the hardware. You can also mental model 
the hardware with Intercal, if you haven't managed just means you 
haven't tried hard enough.

>
> 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.

Even worse in C++ with its changing standards ever 5 years.