Remember the Vasa! by Bjarne Stroustrup

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, May 29, 2018 03:43:00 TheMightWarship via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Tuesday, 29 May 2018 at 01:46:47 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> > A cautionary tale we should all keep in mind.
> >
> > http://open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers/2018/p0977r0.pdf
> >
> > https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8mq10v/bjarne_stroustroup_
> > remeber_the_vasa_critique_of/
> >
> > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17172057
>
> Bjarne  opens with: "Many/most people in WG21 are working
> independently towards non-shared goals."
>
> I presume, this is essentially a criticism??
>
> If so, I reject that as criticism. There has to be room for
> allowing people to puruse their individual goals too, and a
> programming langauge should allow that as well.

I don't think that it's really a criticism of folks having individual goals.
The overall criticism seems to be that while those involved may have varying
goals, the resulting language needs to be reasonably coherent and usable by
the lay programmer. So, ultimately, when new language features are
introduced, you need to examine how they fit in with everything else (both
what's already in the language and what's being proposed) and potentially
adjust what's being proposed to make it all fit together better. Right now,
they're getting a bunch of indpendent proposals that don't take each other
into account at all, and it sounds like a lot of them aren't even talking
about how this will help or hurt the average C++ programmer. It's more like
they're just trying to get their pet feature into the language. So,
Stroustrup thinks that they should be trying to make everything fit together
better and aim it at how it affects the average C++ programmer who's just
trying to get their job done rather than trying to get every stray thing
into the language that seems like it would be valuable. He even talks about
how the Vasa could have succeeded if a bit more work had been put into
making sure how all of the adjustments to the vessel worked together. It
didn't need to give up on everything that was done to improve it. Rather, it
needed to be more coherent in its parts. C++ is suffering from a major case
of being designed by committee.

- Jonathan M Davis