Remember the Vasa! by Bjarne Stroustrup

[Dave Jones]

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."