"It's official. Java has taken the top spot away from C++ to become the top language on SourceForge. Mats Henricson points out in his blog that as of yesterday, Java has 16738 projects on SourceForge, compared to the 16731 of C++."
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Member since:2005-10-08
"C++ is just a big kludge. Yes, I understand why people defend it. To become a master with it takes a long time. It's a huge investment, and nobody wants their investment to be for naught."
True. And historically this has been a serious problem for the industry in general. Dijkstra publlished his classic "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" paper in Communications of the ACM back in 1968. And was two years before that even, in 1966, that Bohm and Jacopini demonstrated that any program could be written using only structured programming. But both these papers were largely ignored by the industry until the early 1980s, and as such, they continued to write unstructured code riddled with goto statements, because it was they knew. And because of that, deadlines continued to slip, maintainability continuted to be near impossible, etc... All because people didn't want to learn new ways to do things...
Member since:"C++ is just a big kludge... I'm cheering for C#. *Finally*, it looks like a big commercial company is going to push programmers toward something that's LISPish."
Then why is MS Office still written in C++, with no announced plans to port to C#? And the Windows executive+kernel is written in C/C++/assembly language. What major products does Microsoft sell (as opposed to services) that are primarily written using CLR-based languages?
Paul G
Member since:2005-10-08
"Then why is MS Office still written in C++, with no announced plans to port to C#? And the Windows executive+kernel is written in C/C++/assembly language. What major products does Microsoft sell (as opposed to services) that are primarily written using CLR-based languages?"
Because for a long time it was the best thing available. And please... If you don't recognize that C++ is a kludge, you have been living under a rock. It's not exactly a model of a good object oriented language. The desire to maintain backward compatibility with C made it a horrible mess.
And as far as your claim that Microsoft is not selling products written using CLR languages, I guess you haven't been paying much attention there either. Office .NET is already running on inside Microsoft, and future versions of office will be based on the .NET, not written in native languages.
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They're just busy fixing memory leaks.
C has an elegant simplicity. Java allows one to focus on algorithms rather than petty niggling with memory management.
C++ is just a big kludge. Yes, I understand why people defend it. To become a master with it takes a long time. It's a huge investment, and nobody wants their investment to be for naught.
I'm cheering for C#. *Finally*, it looks like a big commercial company is going to push programmers toward something that's LISPish. Enough of these half-assed implementations--a little OOP here, GC there, argh.
We need something more powerful than C++ in the abstraction department if we ever hope to conquer AI.