On Mon, 2004-02-02 at 23:01, Ken Foskey wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-02-02 at 22:02, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
> 
> > That is one of the funniest things I have read in a long time. The
> > opening sentence "We want to make our programs easy to write, correct,
> > maintainable and acceptably efficient." from the main architect of 
> > C++. The irony is astounding.
> 
> The art of unix programming has a bit to say about OOo and programming
> in general.  Should be required reading for ALL programmers, Joel on
> software agrees and he is die hard Windows...
> 
> http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/

What he says is interesting, but I'm not persuaded. He cites bad
programming style as bad things about C++. I've seen awful C over the
years. And nearly every C program I've seen that does any runtime
parameterisation does so by manually implementing C++ elements such as
vtables, per structure/type memory allocation and so forth.

Yes, it's easy to write horrendous, spaghetti, layered without value,
with vicious inheritance trees.

It's equally easy to write C in bad form, with parameters lists as long
as your arm, and so deeply indented loops or conditionals you start
typeing at column 50.

Writing excellent code - in any language - requires knowledge, skill and
practice. Conversely, nearly any language can have excellent code
written in it (brainfuck being the obvious exception :}). The principals
that ESR promotes - of transparency, orthogonality & encapsulation - are
useful anywhere. OO can be percieved as making a religion out of one
aspect of that - but that is not an accurate summation of what OO
languages are about.

Rob
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