Re: C++ *for Git*

Kyle Rose [off-list ref] writes:

I think the exception handling, garbage collection, and implicit
object destruction provided by those languages (and by C++, as
overwrought as it is) makes any codebase easier to understand and
maintain.

Of course, some of the most horrid unreadable source code I've ever seen
is in one of git's competitors -- written in python....

-Miles
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Miles Bader wrote:

Of course, some of the most horrid unreadable source code I've ever seen
is in one of git's competitors -- written in python....

Indeed. :-)

At the office, people constantly badmouth Perl, which has some
admittedly evil syntax (especially around exception handling).  My view
is that good Perl programmers can produce good, readable, maintainable
Perl programs, while bad Perl programmers can produce spaghetti the
likes of which can't be found outside Italy.

OTOH, I think it is much harder to hang one's self with Python, though
admittedly possible, as it is when you combine a bad coder with *any*
language.  Still, typical bad programmer + Perl is much worse than
typical bad programmer + Python.

C++ is in the same category as Perl IMO: too easy to produce unreadable
code.  I contend that C is pretty much just as bad, though in a
different way: while C lacks C++'s ability to bury code in multiple
layers of opaque abstractions, C makes up for it by providing absolutely
no GC-type structures (i.e., I do this now, you clean it up later when
I'm no longer interested in it).  C is all explicit, which is nice when
you have a good handle on everything that is going on *or* an explicit
system for remembering to do those types of cleanup tasks that is
well-understood by all developers involved.

I like Ruby, except for the performance problems.  Once they have those
worked out, Ruby will be "Perl done right." ;-)

Kyle

On 9/22/07, Kyle Rose [off-list ref] wrote:

C++ is in the same category as Perl IMO: too easy to produce unreadable
code.  I contend that C is pretty much just as bad, though in a
different way: while C lacks C++'s ability to bury code in multiple
layers of opaque abstractions, C makes up for it by providing absolutely
no GC-type structures (i.e., I do this now, you clean it up later when
I'm no longer interested in it).  C is all explicit, which is nice when
you have a good handle on everything that is going on *or* an explicit
system for remembering to do those types of cleanup tasks that is
well-understood by all developers involved.

I'd say being forced to be explicit is a good thing here, so that the
programmer at least has some sort of good understanding of what is
going on, and chances are that if he doesn't really know, things just
won't work out (quite unlike a lot of other languages where this
programmer might actually end up with something half-assed that
"mostly" works).

For some reason it seems to me a lot harder to find bad programmers
surviving using C than a lot of the other languages.

Alex

On Sun, Sep 23, 2007 at 12:50:00AM +0200, Alex Unleashed wrote:

I'd say being forced to be explicit is a good thing here, so that the
programmer at least has some sort of good understanding of what is
going on, and chances are that if he doesn't really know, things just
won't work out (quite unlike a lot of other languages where this
programmer might actually end up with something half-assed that
"mostly" works).
For some reason it seems to me a lot harder to find bad programmers
surviving using C than a lot of the other languages.

Idiot-proofness-by-complexity is a myth IMHO. Idiots can be quite
persistent...

Gruesse,
-- 
Frank Lichtenheld [off-list ref]
www: http://www.djpig.de/

On Sun, Sep 23, 2007 at 04:09:51AM +0200, Frank Lichtenheld wrote:

On Sun, Sep 23, 2007 at 12:50:00AM +0200, Alex Unleashed wrote:

quoted

I'd say being forced to be explicit is a good thing here, so that the
programmer at least has some sort of good understanding of what is
going on, and chances are that if he doesn't really know, things just
won't work out (quite unlike a lot of other languages where this
programmer might actually end up with something half-assed that
"mostly" works).
For some reason it seems to me a lot harder to find bad programmers
surviving using C than a lot of the other languages.

Idiot-proofness-by-complexity is a myth IMHO. Idiots can be quite
persistent...

I work with plenty of them :-)  It's all C.  All of the same things happen,
with management looking for magic bullets to solve problems caused by bad
programmers.

Dave