[]
And as for the C++ code examples? You simply don’t understand what Bjarne is trying to explain.
[/]
Since I’ve been reading his writings, listening to his interviews/talks, and watching him lecture for many many MANY hours these past few months, I think I have a very clear understanding on his outlook by now. I would be far more comfortable betting on THAT then of your obscure/vague statements of “my misunderstanding him”…
He has been frustrated by the situation of C++, fully acknowledging it’s problems and dangers (even giving real-world examples, like with the NASA’s space-probe that failed to reach Mars…) and openly discussing them (which is something that I never saw you do), and has been for many years now, and is very excited about the C++11/14 standard that he and his colleagues have been working on this past decade or so…
He talks about how compilers from different vendors produce artifacts that are incompatible with other vendor’s compiles, mainly due to political-factors, and how bad this is for .
He talks about the issues of “resource-ownership” that is SO EASY to get wrong, and why RAII, move-semantics and smart-pointers are so important and how they circumvent many of the potential pitfalls relating to resource-ownership (and thus why STL’s “containers” and other such “handles” as he calls them, as so crucial for the future of C++).
He talks about how the current implementation of Templates creates a situation in which compiler-errors are so overly verbose, obscure and unintelligible, and why “Concepts” are so important to resolve that (by providing point-of-use checks/error-reporting), and why he pushed for “concepts-lite” for C++11/14 (ultimately unsuccessfully… they will be a C++14-TR, and a C++17 feature…).
He talks about how inevitably SLOWLY the industry is going to adopt the new standards, due to how slowly academic-curriculum and their reading-materials change, and the huge mess of “legacy code” laying-around that people would have to suffer through in the next few decades, and what can be done to ease this pain. While the new standards don’t brake backwards-compatibility in existing code, the DO BRAKE existing LITERATURE and CURRICULUMs, which will be a grate difficulty for C++ in the decade to come.
He talks about how SMALL the standard-library is, compared to “commercial” languages, due to the fact that C++ has no owner and hence no financial-backing, and what a disastrous-effect that has had on the immense FRAGMENTATION of disparate-incompatible solutions to common recurring use-cases (like file-system, sockets, GUIs, etc.), and how this is finally starting to be addressed…
He talks about how the existence of the “#include” model has made compile-times go through the roof, and how there is no standard-description of avoiding that, and how badly C++ is in need of a “module-system” (which is in the works for C++17).
He talks about all of these things (and many more) that are very well know inside-and-outside of the C++ community, and make it look-bad and rightfully-so, things that you are NOT even considering.
So yeah, I’m sorry, but I’ll take the words of the word’s biggest C++ standards contributor and inventor of the language, much more then I would take some anonymous obviously-overly-enthusiastic poster on some forum… (No offence…)
Really, given the enormous plethora of issues plaguing the C++ language, that are so well-known and wide-spread, and so often talked about, you would have to be willfully and intentionally blind, deaf and mute to ignore all of them and still admire it…
Kinda like this:
Really, the more your current attitude persist, the more you are making a fool out of yourself…
So just stop…