[sf-lug] installfest Sat. @ Rick Moen's in Menlo Park/ Xandros response

[jim stockford]

Willy Lee signed off one of his messages with

"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder,
but when you do, it blows away your whole leg." -Bjarne Stroustrup

My remark was a wisecrack I'd invented after experiencing
first the hype about the great benefits of OOP then the
disappointments of reality, given I got sucked into the hype:
    One company advertised its wares as C++ which I thought
was really C==, as they used Visual C++ compiler and wrote
regular old grunt and groan C, big case statements that
could have been replace by a class hierarchy. I derived that
committing to a class hierarchy design was scary for them
(and that seems a prudent stance).
    The promise that once debugged, underlying class code
need not be re-debugged as one develops classes turned
out to be sometimes mistaken.
    For MSFT Visual C++ at least, the virtual table mechanism
allows occasional corruption of resources.
    Multiple inheritance is scary on the face of it, at least to me.
    Pointedly, the remark is about the risks of the underlying
classes' behavior, not code readability or the skill of any
particular programmer.
    It was just a wisecrack with maybe a little truth to it. I'll
confess that I believe it.


On Jul 10, 2006, at 10:08 PM, Rick Moen wrote:

> Quoting jim stockford (jim at well.com):
>
>>     Best I can tell, OOP (e.g. C++) adds a whole
>> new dimension to the term "spaghetti code".
>
> I'm not sure why you'd say that.  Elegant and readable code is very
> common in, e.g., Python and Ruby.  Sometimes even C++.  (I say that as 
> a
> somewhat irredeemable procedural programming dinosaur, myself.)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> sf-lug mailing list
> sf-lug at linuxmafia.com
> http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/sf-lug
>