The Invention of C++(artlung.com)
artlung.com
The Invention of C++
http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/Invention_of_Cplusplus.shtml
8 comments
Even for people who are humor-deficient, there's at least one dead giveaway:
"Whoever heard of memory leaks in a 'C' program?"
"Whoever heard of memory leaks in a 'C' program?"
I remember I was amazed that IEEE Computer did give an interview with Stroustrup shortly after this hoax interview was circulated on the net. The real interview was not as funny as the hoax one but nevertheless was interesting.
http://www.research.att.com/~bs/ieee_interview.html
http://www.research.att.com/~bs/ieee_interview.html
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Even though it's fashionable to make fun of C++, I have to admit that next to Python, it's my favorite language ;)
Reading comments first would have spoiled this wonderful practical joke.
Fortunately I read it some time ago uninitiated. Sure I was lured into seriousness for a while. Then this-can't-be-true of course set in.
I wouldn't want to have missed that experience. As any practical joke, it makes one think about the capability of ones skepticism. A capability worth keeping in good shape.
The sad thing is how many people get supper upset when somebody posts this somewhere, as if it was such an incredibly offensive joke, and as if you were spreading some really evil lies.
If somebody does take this interview seriously, it says more about them and about C++ than about the nature of the interview or whoever posted it.
And just because something is a hoax (and a rather obvious one at that) doesn't mean that it can't be filled with deep truths.
If somebody does take this interview seriously, it says more about them and about C++ than about the nature of the interview or whoever posted it.
And just because something is a hoax (and a rather obvious one at that) doesn't mean that it can't be filled with deep truths.
Regarding Unix++, I think the BeOS kernel was written in C++, and BeOS was one hell of a great os.
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I think I still have the c++ preprocessor (c++ to c converter) here somewhere that I first used to learn c++...
Time certainly flies when you're having fun.
Now lets hope nobody takes this 'interview' seriously.
Time certainly flies when you're having fun.
Now lets hope nobody takes this 'interview' seriously.
Twenty years ago, you'd get flamed to a crisp for that 'preprocessor' slip ...
[Amplification for those not watching back then: it was an important theological^Wtechnical point that 'cfront' (C++ -> C) was not just a simple macro expander like the C preprocessor.]
[Amplification for those not watching back then: it was an important theological^Wtechnical point that 'cfront' (C++ -> C) was not just a simple macro expander like the C preprocessor.]
Cfront? I'd completely forgotten about using that. Here's Stroustrup's own history of C++:
http://www.research.att.com/~bs/hopl2.pdf
http://www.research.att.com/~bs/hopl2.pdf
I've found a download link in case anybody would ever want to play with it:
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/c_plus_plus/cfr...
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/c_plus_plus/cfr...
This is funny, in a painful-yes-that-is-true kind of way. I am glad to be out of the C++ business.
I knew it was a joke, but the funny thing is that most of it is true...c++ IS a jumbled mess, IMO. Sure, it made OOP popular, which paved the way for newer languages to implement it more cleanly, and make it easier to use/think about. C++ is good for generics, and native performance/compilers, but for some reason i've just always used plain old C for performance/system stuff, and another HLL like C# for OOP. I guess java is cool too, if you're on that side of the fence, but I think its a jumbled mess as well...but that's another story :-)
That sounds like I was bashing it too much...don't get me wrong, I respect C++...its obviously very powerful and popular. But the fake interview was spot on in some points. There's just way too damn much stuff in it for one language, and on many projects, some of its features are used when they were completely unnecessary, only adding complexity and tangled mess. It takes a lot of time and effort to master all of its features, and in many cases is bad for productivity. Also, it is a nightmare reading through a large codebase, unless the project is very well designed and heavily commented.
I could flag this, but it's far better to get a metric for how lame HN is by watching how high it's voted before someone else flags it off.
This is the old joke interview with Stroustrup where he admits C++ was only invented as a plot to increase programmer salaries by making programming more difficult than it had to be.
It should be pointed out that Stroustrup never gave this interview, and that it is a parody.