Remember the Vasa! by Bjarne Stroustrup

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Tuesday, 29 May 2018 at 23:55:07 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
> On Tuesday, 29 May 2018 at 05:29:00 UTC, Ali wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 29 May 2018 at 03:56:05 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky 
>> wrote:
>>> It seems C++ is following the road of PL/I, which is growing 
>>> language way beyond the point anyone can understand or 
>>> implement all of it.
>>
>> A key line from this paper
>>
>>>  We now have about 150 cooks; that’s not a good way to get a 
>>> tasty and balanced meal.
>>
>> I don't think Bjarne is against adding feature to C++, or even 
>> constantly adding feature
>> he even admits to support some of the features he mention in 
>> his list
>>
>> I think he is worried about
>> 1. the huge number of features being targeted at once
>> 2. the features coming from different independent teams, 
>> making them less likely to be coherent
>
> Which is ironic considering...
>
> Ken Thomson : " Stroustrup campaigned for years and years and 
> years, way beyond any sort of technical contributions he made 
> to the language, to get it adopted and used. And he sort of ran 
> all the standards committees with a whip and a chair. And he 
> said “no” to no one. He put every feature in that language that 
> ever existed. It wasn’t cleanly designed—it was just the union 
> of everything that came along. And I think it suffered 
> drastically from that."
>
> Donald Knuth : "Whenever the C++ language designers had two 
> competing ideas as to how they should solve some problem, they 
> said "OK, we'll do them both". So the language is too baroque 
> for my taste."

A dysregulation of caution is more the rule than the exception in 
modern times.  People say yes when they should have said no, and 
then after the mess becomes evident in reaction to it they say no 
when they should be saying yes (in response to efforts to clear 
things up).  Viz the response before and after the credit crisis.