Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> The guy who bought the cheesy, buggy, C++ compiler that came with the
> GUI wizard and magical debugger and the half-million lines of class-library
> code got his project out the door 6 months ahead of you because you're still
> building the interface bindings to the OS.

Here's what Scott Meyers has to say in his preface to _Effective STL_:
<http://www.awprofessional.com/catalog/product.asp?product_id={AA4735AF-4407-4011-B7D3-0C924DFA675D}&selectDescTypeId={0BBA7A1C-E080-49A0-B103-E1BE9F7C7092}&st={75A0BC87-B9B4-435A-86E0-36F0AC8E0923}&session_id={4C1AEA22-4C0C-4D62-8DB2-5552A4AFA3C9}>

     Then I began to notice something that took me by surprise. Despite
     the portability problems, despite the dismal documentation, despite
     the compiler diagnostics resembling transmission line noise, many
     of my consulting clients were using the STL anyway. Furthermore,
     they weren't just playing with it, they were using it in production
     code! That was a revelation. I knew that the STL featured an elegant
     design, but any library where programmers are willing to endure
     portability headaches, poor documentation, and incomprehensible error
     messages has a lot more going for it than just good design. For an
     increasingly large number of professional programmers, I realized,
     even a bad implementation of the STL was preferable to no implementation
     at all.