Subject

[Russel Winder]

On Wed, 2019-08-07 at 17:16 -0700, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[…]
> 
> Before ZTC++, C++ was a curiosity on unix platforms that was battling 
> neck-and-neck with Objective C. (The comp.lang.c++ and comp.lang.objectivec 
> newsgroups had about the same traffic volume.) After ZTC++ appeared, C++
> boomed 
> and ObjC tanked (and was rescued from oblivion by Apple).

Being in the UNIX (well Solaris) world at the time at UCL, C++ was seen as
interesting but in need of templates which it then got (1990) and so became
viable, and Objective C was seen (possibly wrongly but still) as ramming
Smalltalk and C together badly and so not viable. Someone got a few NeXT
machines but they got put in a cupboard to gather dust: nice UI paradigm,
useless programming platform. Macintosh had already taken hold in the HCI and
media communities.

I was teaching C++ to first year second term (first term they did Scheme (1987
and 1988) or Miranda (1989 onwards) undergraduates 1987 to 1992 – all dates
±1. We used the Glockespiel compiler because CFront was an afront, and GCC was
not up to it. Students liked it and did very well. After 1990 anyway when we
didn't have to do #define/void* hacks to create data structures but could use
templates.

Of course templates with untyped parameters was an error, still not fixed in
C++20 – apparently Concepts got pulled out again.

-- 
Russel.
===========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/digitalmars-d/attachments/20190808/e04920fc/attachment.sig>