$640.00 to fill the tanks...

Matt Whiting wrote:
I'm not sure what fits GPS

Python.

Roy Smith wrote:

Matt Whiting wrote:

I'm not sure what fits GPS


Python.

I'm not familiar with Python.

Matt

("Paul Tomblin" wrote)
You know who else are stumped? Carpenters who wanted to catch their own
mistakes rather than having safety guards on their saws.


g


Montblack

On 2006-08-28, Roger wrote:
C. C++ just saves us the time of having to write all that code. It's
also why compiling 37K of source code may give you a 30 Meg EXE. :-))

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 was so huge, it took five
minutes to load, on an HP workstation, with 128MB of RAM. Then it ran
like treacle. Actually, I thought this would be a major
stumbling-block, and I'd get found out within a week, but nobody cared.
Sun and HP were only too glad to sell enormously powerful boxes, with
huge resources just to run trivial programs. You know, when we had our
first C++ compiler, at AT&T, I compiled 'Hello World', and couldn't
believe the size of the executable. 2.1MB.

Interviewer: What? Well, compilers have come a long way, since then.

Stroustrup: They have? Try it on the latest version of g++ - you won't
get much change out of half a megabyte. Also, there are several quite
recent examples for you, from all over the world. British Telecom had a
major disaster on their hands but, luckily, managed to scrap the whole
thing and start again. They were luckier than Australian Telecom. Now
I hear that Siemens is building a dinosaur, and getting more and more
worried as the size of the hardware gets bigger, to accommodate the
executables. Isn't multiple inheritance a joy?

Interviewer: Yes, but C++ is basically a sound language.

Stroustrup: You really believe that, don't you? Have you ever sat down
and worked on a C++ project? Here's what happens: First, I've put in
enough pitfalls to make sure that only the most trivial projects will
work first time. Take operator overloading. At the end of the project,
almost every module has it, usually, because guys feel they really
should do it, as it was in their training course. The same operator then
means something totally different in every module. Try pulling that lot
together, when you have a hundred or so modules. And as for data hiding.
God, I sometimes can't help laughing when I hear about the problems
companies have making their modules talk to each other. I think the word
'synergistic' was specially invented to twist the knife in a project
manager's ribs.

Interviewer: I have to say, I'm beginning to be quite appalled at all
this. You say you did it to raise programmers' salaries? That's
obscene.

Stroustrup: Not really. Everyone has a choice. I didn't expect the
thing to get so much out of hand. Anyway, I basically succeeded. C++ is
dying off now, but programmers still get high salaries - especially
those poor devils who have to maintain all this crap. You do realise,
it's impossible to maintain a large C++ software module if you
didn't actually write it?

Interviewer: How come?

Stroustrup: You are out of touch, aren't you? Remember the typedef?

Interviewer: Yes, of course.

Stroustrup: Remember how long it took to grope through the header files
only to find that 'RoofRaised' was a double precision number? Well,
imagine how long it takes to find all the implicit typedefs in all the
Classes in a major project.

Interviewer: So how do you reckon you've succeeded?

Stroustrup: Remember the length of the average-sized 'C' project? About
6 months. Not nearly long enough for a guy with a wife and kids to earn
enough to have a decent standard of living. Take the same project,
design it in C++ and what do you get? I'll tell you. One to two years.
Isn't that great? All that job security, just through one mistake
of judgement. And another thing. The universities haven't been teaching
'C' for such a long time, there's now a shortage of decent 'C'
programmers. Especially those who know anything about Unix systems
programming. How many guys would know what to do with 'malloc', when
they've used 'new' all these years - and never bothered to check the
return code. In fact, most C++ programmers throw away their return
codes. Whatever happened to good ol' '-1'? At least you knew you had an
error, without bogging the thing down in all that 'throw' 'catch' 'try'
stuff.

Interviewer: But, surely, inheritance does save a lot of time?

Stroustrup: Does it? Have you ever noticed the difference between a 'C'
project plan, and a C++ project plan? The planning stage for a C++
project is three times as long. Precisely to make sure that everything
which should be inherited is, and what shouldn't isn't. Then, they still
get it wrong. Whoever heard of memory leaks in a 'C' program? Now
finding them is a major industry. Most companies give up, and send the
product out, knowing it leaks like a sieve, simply to avoid the expense
of tracking them all down.

Interviewer: There are tools...

Stroustrup: Most of which were written in C++.

Interviewer: If we publish this, you'll probably get lynched, you do
realise that?

Stroustrup: I doubt it. As I said, C++ is way past its peak now, and no
company in its right mind would start a C++ project without a pilot
trial. That should convince them that it's the road to disaster. If not,
they deserve all they get. You know, I tried to convince Dennis Ritchie
to rewrite Unix in C++..

Interviewer: Oh my God. What did he say?

Stroustrup: Well, luckily, he has a good sense of humor. I think both
he and Brian figured out what I was doing, in the early days, but never
let on. He said he'd help me write a C++ version of DOS, if I was
interested.

Interviewer: Were you?

Stroustrup: Actually, I did write DOS in C++, I'll give you a demo when
we're through. I have it running on a Sparc 20 in the computer room.
Goes like a rocket on 4 CPU's, and only takes up 70 megs of disk.

Interviewer: What's it like on a PC?

Stroustrup: Now you're kidding. Haven't you ever seen Windows '95? I
think of that as my biggest success. Nearly blew the game before I was
ready, though.

Interviewer: You know, that idea of a Unix++ has really got me
thinking. Somewhere out there, there's a guy going to try it.

Stroustrup: Not after they read this interview.

Interviewer: I'm sorry, but I don't see us being able to publish any of
this.

Stroustrup: But it's the story of the century. I only want to be
remembered by my fellow programmers, for what I've done for them. You
know how much a C++ guy can get these days?

Interviewer: Last I heard, a really top guy is worth $70 - $80 an hour.

Stroustrup: See? And I bet he earns it. Keeping track of all the
gotchas I put into C++ is no easy job. And, as I said before, every C++
programmer feels bound by some mystic promise to use every damn element
of the language on every project. Actually, that really annoys me
sometimes, even though it serves my original purpose. I almost like the
language after all this time.

Interviewer: You mean you didn't before?

Stroustrup: Hated it. It even looks clumsy, don't you agree? But when
the book royalties started to come in... well, you get the picture.

Interviewer: Just a minute. What about references? You must admit, you
improved on 'C' pointers.

Stroustrup: Hmm. I've always wondered about that. Originally, I thought
I had. Then, one day I was discussing this with a guy who'd written C++
from the beginning. He said he could never remember whether his
variables were referenced or dereferenced, so he always used pointers.
He said the little asterisk always reminded him.

Interviewer: Well, at this point, I usually say 'thank you very much'
but it hardly seems adequate.

Stroustrup: Promise me you'll publish this. My conscience is getting
the better of me these days.

Interviewer: I'll let you know, but I think I know what my editor will
say.

Stroustrup: Who'd believe it anyway? Although, can you send me a copy
of that tape?

Interviewer: I can do that.

End of interview




Yes, it's a hoax. But I've worked on a 2+ MLOC C++ project and it cust
*awfully* close to the truth.
--
Yes, the Reply-To email address is valid.
Oolite-Linux: an Elite tribute: http://oolite-linux.berlios.de

On Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:26:38 +0000 (UTC), (Roy Smith)
wrote:
Python.

I believe that Python is only an interpreted language... The only
interpreted language that I ever really liked was APL... It had enough
interesting features that having it as an interpreter was
acceptable... Of course, I've known programmers who said that you
weren't a REAL PROGRAMMER unless you programmed in JOVIAL... Of
course, at the time, they had lost their JOVIAL programming job
because the DoD had cancelled that project and were now at NASA
programming in 'C'...

On 2006-08-27, Jose wrote:
ubiquitousness made it very vulnerable (you can go to anywhere - there
is no "come from" statement).

There is in INTERCAL, I think :-)

--
Yes, the Reply-To email address is valid.
Oolite-Linux: an Elite tribute: http://oolite-linux.berlios.de

On 2006-08-27, Grumman-581 wrote:
HTML was OK as it was originally designed -- as a markup mechanism for
text... What we've done with it since is ridiculous... Personally, I
would have preferred to have seen X-Windows or even DisplayPostScript
adopted, but oh well, such is life... A better technical solution is
not always the one that gets selected...

Sometimes, a god-awful "solution" (more of a precipitate, me thinks)
gets selected. AJAX is an _abortion_ - it really does feel like trying
to tighten phillips screws with the tip of a steak knife. AJAX may be
the buzzword du jour but it's _nasty_. Trying to draw interfaces in
HTML...ugh. Not to mention the typical AJAX user interface makes a ZX
Spectrum look lightning fast.

SOAP is another. Have you ever looked at a SOAP call with a web analyzer
and seen what crap has to go over the wire just to return a boolean
value? XML should absolutely never be used for RPC calls. What were they
thinking? That's not to mention the layers of crap each call has to go
through to actually get to the code its supposed to run. Then look at
the insanity that's a WSDL file.

--
Yes, the Reply-To email address is valid.
Oolite-Linux: an Elite tribute: http://oolite-linux.berlios.de

Good one, Roy, and brought it back on topic in the process!

Oh buggers, now Grumman is going to get mad! g

Jose
--
The monkey turns the crank and thinks he's making the music.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

On 2006-08-28, Paul Tomblin wrote:
In a previous article, Matt Whiting said:
Wow, I've never heard that excuse before ... not. Any skilled
tradesperson or professional will use better tools when they are
available. Programmers are one of the few professions that don't. I
honestly have tried to figure this out, as have many others, but I'm
still stumped.

You know who else are stumped? Carpenters who wanted to catch their own
mistakes rather than having safety guards on their saws.

Sometimes, C or C++ is the right tool for the job.

On the other hand, I don't think anyone should write C professionally
until they've used asm in anger (any asm, it doesn't matter which). When
you've written an asm program, and see some buffer run off the end and
over your stack, you understand on a visceral level why you should check
buffers. Those developers who've only ever used a compiler may not be
aware of how things might get arranged in memory, and might believe that
a buffer overflow will just cause a crash. Those who have written stuff
in asm - any asm, even 8 bit stuff, will know that the RET instruction
gets the return address off the stack. They will therefore also know the
consequences of something smashing through the stack, and replacing the
word on the stack that contains the return address. They will know this
because to write anything non-trivial in asm, they will have had to have
thought about this kind of thing.

--
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Oolite-Linux: an Elite tribute: http://oolite-linux.berlios.de

Jose wrote:
Good one, Roy, and brought it back on topic in the process!


Oh buggers, now Grumman is going to get mad! g

Don't worry, his bark is worse than his bite. :-)

Matt