-Original Message-
From: Anna Hristova [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, November 16, 2001 2:38 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Sava Nikolov; Svetlin Grancharov;
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: FW: Staro, no klasika
-Original Message-
From: Vladimir Panov [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: 14 îÏÅÍ×ÒÉ 2001 17:32
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Staro, no klasika
Chudya se dali da ne izfabrikuvam neshto podobno za Java... V neya ima
mnogo poveche material :-)))
On the 1st of January, 1998, Bjarne Stroustrup gave an interview to the
IEEE's 'Computer' magazine.
naturally, the editors thought he would be giving a retrospective view
of seven years of object-oriented design, using the language he created.
By the end of the interview, the interviewer got more than he had
bargained for and, subsequently, the editor decided to suppress its
contents, 'for the good of the industry' but, as with many of these
things, there was a leak.
Here is a complete transcript of what was was said,unedited, and
unrehearsed, so it isn't as neat as planned interviews.
You will find it interesting...
__
Interviewer: Well, it's been a few years since you changed the world of
software design, how does it feel, looking back?
Stroustrup: Actually, I was thinking about those days, just before you
arrived. Do you remember? Everyone was writing 'C' and, the trouble
was, they were pretty damn good at it. Universities got pretty good at
teaching it, too. They were turning out competent - I stress the word
'competent'
-
graduates at a phenomenal rate. That's what caused the problem.
Interviewer: problem?
Stroustrup: Yes, problem. Remember when everyone wrote Cobol?
Interviewer: Of course, I did too
Stroustrup: Well, in the beginning, these guys were like demi-gods.
Their salaries were high, and they were treated like royalty.
Interviewer: Those were the days, eh?
Stroustrup: Right. So what happened? IBM got sick of it, and invested
millions in training programmers, till they were a dime a dozen.
Interviewer: That's why I got out. Salaries dropped within a year, to
the point where being a journalist actually paid better.
Stroustrup: Exactly. Well, the same happened with 'C' programmers.
Interviewer: I see, but what's the point?
Stroustrup: Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought
of this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little. I
thought 'I wonder what would happen, if there were a language so
complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to
swamp the market with programmers? Actually, I got some of the ideas
from X10, you know, X windows. That was such a bitch of a graphics
system, that it only just ran on those Sun 3/60 things. They had all the
ingredients for what I wanted. A really ridiculously complex syntax,
obscure functions, and pseudo-OO structure. Even now, nobody writes raw
X-windows code. Motif is the only way to go if you want to retain your
sanity.
Interviewer: You're kidding...?
Stroustrup: Not a bit of it. In fact, there was another problem. Unix
was written in 'C', which meant that any 'C' programmer could very
easily become a systems programmer. Remember what a mainframe systems
programmer used to earn?
Interviewer: You bet I do, that's what I used to do.
Stroustrup: OK, so this new language had to divorce itself from Unix,
by hiding all the system calls that bound the two together so nicely.
This would enable guys who only knew about DOS to earn a decent living
too.
Interviewer: I don't believe you said that...
Stroustrup: Well, it's been long enough, now, and I believe most people
have figured out for themselves that C++ is a waste of time but, I must
say, it's taken them a lot longer than I thought it would.
Interviewer: So how exactly did you do it?
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.
Interviewer: What?
Stroustrup: And as for 're-useable code' - when did you ever hear of a
company re-using its code?
Interviewer: Well, never, actually, but...
Stroustrup: There you are then. Mind you, a few tried, in the early
days. There was this Oregon company - Mentor Graphics, I think they were
called - really caught a cold trying to rewrite everything in C++ in
about '90 or
'91. I felt sorry for them really, but I thought people would learn from
their mistakes.
Interviewer: Obviously, they didn't?
Stroustrup: Not in the slightest. Trouble is, most companies hush-up
all their major blunders, and explaining a $30 million loss to the
shareholders would have been difficult. Give them their due, though,
they made it work in the end.
Interviewer: They did? Well, there you are then, it proves O-O works.
Stroustrup: Well, almost. The executable
