Bjarne Stroustrup: “I Did It For You All…”

[cgroen]

Now this is funny 

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/I_did_it_for_you_all

(sorry if this has been posted before, I did not find a thread here when searching)

[Ed.Kloonk]

I understood that to be a bit of a hoax.

[cgroen]

I understood that to be a bit of a hoax.

I would absolutely hope that too!

[magic]

I would hope it be true and engineers wouldn't mind supporting fellow engineers like lawyers and politicians do

[SiliconWizard]

I like this website. Pretty interesting and fun stuff.
I actually read this recently, which I found hilarious: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/soap/simple

As to this interview - whereas the "alleged" Stroustrup makes actually a number of good points, I really doubt he did say that himself. Not only because I have never really heard him doubt his own work from a technical standpoint, but also because it's definitely not his style of speaking.

[cfbsoftware]

As to this interview - whereas the "alleged" Stroustrup makes actually a number of good points, I really doubt he did say that himself.

Indeed - it is an excellent example of 'satire'. For more background on these humourous articles see the top-level introduction:

http://harmful.cat-v.org/

[DiTBho]

Stroustrup: It was only supposed to be a joke, I never thought people would take the book seriously. Anyone with half a brain can see that object-oriented programming is counter-intuitive, illogical and inefficient..

Steve Jobs, CEO of Next, said just the opposite 

[DiTBho]

Stroustrup: And as for ’re-useable code' - when did you ever hear of a company re-using its code?

Acorn 

[SiliconWizard]

Interestingly though, Stroustrup with C++ is defnitely one of the people who pushed this kind of OO to the world (if not the first?), the kind that is in fact now increasingly considered "harmful" by many.

As Alan Kay said:

… it is interesting … to look at what is actually being done in the world under the name of OOP [Object-Oriented Programming]. I’ve been shown some very strange-looking pieces of code over the years by various people, including people in universities, that they have said is OOP code, and written in an OOP language – and actually I made up the term object-oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

https://ivanovivan.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/alan-kay-quotes/

The point is, OOP as C++ (and many other later languages) implemented it was mainly a way of structuring programs in a modular way, something that other languages had already solved (via modules) in a much more elegant, to the point and maintainable way. But the "OO" part of them? It has only very little to do with how Alan Kay defined OOP.

[AntiProtonBoy]

Interestingly though, Stroustrup with C++ is defnitely one of the people who pushed this kind of OO to the world (if not the first?), the kind that is in fact now increasingly considered "harmful" by many.

I really dislike the byword "considered harmful", because anyone making claims or writing blogs about those kinds of things is in itself is harmful.

OO in itself is not any more harmful than functional programming or procedural programming. Context really matters and it's a question of whether OO fits the particular problem domain you want to solve or not. For example, taking an OO centric approach to provide functionality to primitive types, or plain-old-data types is a brain dead solution. Conversely, if you have some kind of data aggregate that needs to be protected and mutated in a controlled fashion, OO perfectly fits the problem.

tl;dr: OO is fine, right tool for the right job, et cetera.

[DiTBho]

In legend, Delphi was the major oracle who  was consulted.

Back in the 2000s, Delphi was a dialect of the Object Pascal programming language and with the compiler there was also an integrated development environment (IDE) with a visual form and lots of training documentation. All sold with the commercial name "Delphi".

But "Delphi" comes from TurboVision, also a Pascal OOP environment, this time designed for DOS. Five books were included with the TurboVision box, one of which was dedicated to OOP.

Theory, practice, examples. Borland has thought a lot about their customers.



But that's all over. Anyway.

[Mechatrommer]

hoax/bogus/BS!... https://www.networkworld.com/article/2222576/snopes-com-debunks-old-c----interview--hoax.html any programmers will come to their senses from experience about which technique is best. if you dont like or find its bogus about operator overloading, you are free not to use it in the future, and if its true, globally it will naturally extinct, but in reality, not so. we still opt whatever OOP features have to offer and freely skip what we dont like. if you really agree with that bogus interview, you can go back to Cobol/Fortran whatever linear programming style, as any modern languages such delphi/java/phyton etc are built based on OOP as their foundation behind the curtain.

"This hoax has been doing the rounds for about a decade. It seems that several times every year someone (usually someone who dislikes C++ for some reason) finds it funny and re-posts it somewhere," Stroustrup says. "By now, I'm a bit tired of it."

anyway its a proof that "free speech" will consist of both sensible and non sensible things. we just need to filter them out with brain.

[cgroen]

Just to make it clear, I don't dislike C++ (at all). I started using it in the 90's, and occasionally still uses it (and maintains programs written in it) both on PC and embedded (ML)

[magic]

For anyone bearing the brunt of an Internet hoax that just won't die, there's little more to hope for in terms of potential relief than a story on Snopes.com stating unequivocally that the hoax is indeed a hoax. After all, Snopes is the gold standard when it comes to debunking nonsense.

Snope's whole "debunking" is based on one argument: the same newspaper which withdrew the interview from publication, later claimed that the interview had never happened.
Well, if I were a newspaper trying to discredit a leaked interview, I would probably say the same
Snope's research only adds to the credibility of this interview, but of course they spin it their way.

[cfbsoftware]

Back in the 2000s, Delphi was a dialect of the Object Pascal programming language and with the compiler there was also an integrated development environment (IDE) with a visual form and lots of training documentation. All sold with the commercial name "Delphi".

But that's all over. Anyway.

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi

[DiTBho]

Back in the 2000s, Delphi was a dialect of the Object Pascal programming language and with the compiler there was also an integrated development environment (IDE) with a visual form and lots of training documentation. All sold with the commercial name "Delphi".

But that's all over. Anyway.

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi

How annoying is when people quote things in the wrong way! My post didn't say that Delphi is died, but rather that there is no more "educational" and "training" effort with the product!

[cfbsoftware]

How annoying is when people quote things in the wrong way! My post didn't say that Delphi is died, but rather that there is no more "educational" and "training" effort with the product!

Apologies for the misunderstanding. That was most certainly not the way it read to me.

[PlainName]

How annoying is when people quote things in the wrong way! My post didn't say that Delphi is died, but rather that there is no more "educational" and "training" effort with the product!

Apologies for the misunderstanding. That was most certainly not the way it read to me.

It did for me, but then I have 1.5 shelf-feet of Borland C++ manuals still. I suspect you need to have pulled a muscle carrying their compilers to have understood his drift

[DiTBho]

It did for me, but then I have 1.5 shelf-feet of Borland C++ manuals still. I suspect you need to have pulled a muscle carrying their compilers to have understood his drift

!!!51Kg of paper!!! ... including TurboVision and Delphi from v1 to v7; when manuals were paper versions, and they included a lot of training and educational stuff.


Nowadays, you buy something, you get a download link and an activation code by email.
Nothing more included (not even stickers)

[DiTBho]

p.s.
I also remember a special "Borland Turbo Pascal v7 Xmas edition", included was a beautiful coffee cup, and distributed alongside Borland Pascal 7 there was "Turbo Vision" on a "bonus" disk and two printed extra manuals.

Xmas 1999. I found it under the tree, and I remember it was a very heavy and big parcel 

[PlainName]

You knew you'd bought something in those days

I splashed on ObjectVision thinking that would be quite cool, but pretty much uniquely for Borland it got canned and buried pretty quick. I think that was the first one that came with just a slim manual, setting a trend.

[ejeffrey]

Interestingly though, Stroustrup with C++ is defnitely one of the people who pushed this kind of OO to the world

Its also the case that C++ is not and never was intended as an "object oriented" programming language.  Maybe "C with classes" started that way I'm not sure, but since very early on C++ was a intended to be a multi-paradigm language capable of high performance. The support for OOP certainly got the most attention, but it is a lot more than that.  It's more helpful to think of C++ as the language where any feature that can be added without causing performance issues for those who don't use it will be implemented.  For better or worse of course.

[SiliconWizard]

Oh, just ran into this gem. I've always found Bjarne Stroustrup certainly brillant, but a bit nuts. Just a personal opinion of course. But after reading this, which admittedly is now a bit old, you'll have a hard time convincing me he isn't - I mean, nuts.

https://stroustrup.com/whitespace98.pdf

That is pure evil genius. Python maintainers should definitely take a hint!
So yeah, look at what C++ missed.

[magic]

Damn, how can we stop this man from destroying the world
You mentioned Python, it's bad enough already.

[Siwastaja]

Oh, just ran into this gem. I've always found Bjarne Stroustrup certainly brillant, but a bit nuts. Just a personal opinion of course. But after reading this, which admittedly is now a bit old, you'll have a hard time convincing me he isn't - I mean, nuts.

https://stroustrup.com/whitespace98.pdf

Note the date of the referenced "AT&T Labs Technical Report no. 42, April 1,1998".

This being said, I'm still not convinced if this is April fools or not, because the content is not that different from what C++ actually became. The problem with Bjarne Stroustrup is, you can't know. It's entirely possible the whole C++ is just a piece of modern art, a psychological experiment, or pure trolling. Nobody knows if Bjarne Stroustrup ever was serious, or if he is laughing in his beard, watching the world go really serious with C++.

Yet it is entirely possible to successfully use C++ to write large and even somewhat maintainable programs. But the human is amazing. Given enough time and motivation, one could make the man go to the Moon using the Brainfuck language entirely.