[article] Language Design Deal Breakers

[Peter Williams]

On 26/05/13 15:44, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 01:27:55PM +1000, Peter Williams wrote:
>> On 26/05/13 11:59, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> [...]
>>> Forget waiting for a huge improvement, I'd have been happy to
>>> ditch C++ even for a small improvement. C++ is such a pain IMO that
>>> using it has about as much inertia as ice skates on concrete.
>>
>> I found shifting from C++ to C an improvement.  (Yes, I learnt C++
>> before I learnt C.)  I should mention that this was back in the mid
>> 90s and C++ may have improved since then :-).
> [...]
>
> You're not the only one who felt that way. At my day job we also
> "upgraded" from C++ back to C. I've often ranted about our horrific
> experience with a hugely over-engineered C++ system that can literally
> do *anything*... except that nobody understood how to use the thing. It
> had dtors with side-effects that did useful work, for instance, and
> there were so many levels of abstraction it was bordering on insanity.
> Once I had to make a function call to said horrible code... it involved
> going through 6 layers of abstraction, two of which were fwrite()ing
> function arguments to a temporary file, then fork() and exec()ing an
> auxilliary utility that fread() the arguments back, and *then*
> dispatched them across an IPC link...

Makes debugging fun doesn't it? :-)

>
> We're now back in C-land, and boy the code is much cleaner, and
> *faster*, even though it's a lot harder to read and more tedious to
> maintain.
>
> Like I've said many times before, the only way I found coding in C++
> tolerable was to use it as "C with classes". Trying to do real OO in C++
> is an exercise in masochism. Even Java with its baroque verbosity and

Amen to that.  One reason I've avoided Java is that I found the signal 
to noise ratio in the source code VERY low and this made reading such 
code to find the bit that actually did something difficult.  I am (or 
was), however, a fan of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) because it offers 
"run anywhere" functionality.

> prolific boilerplates beats C++ hands-down in this respect. And don't
> even mention templates, which are already nasty enough to work with in
> simple generic types; they are utter monstrosities when you start
> getting into CTFE and compile-time codegen. D templates, CTFE, and
> mixins, by contrast, are actually *pleasant* to work with.

I agree.  Although I'm still learning D I'm finding it a pleasure with a 
very high signal to noise ratio in source code.  Plus most features just 
work like one wishes the would.

Peter