Re: True faiths ( was Re: The true faith )

[René <reneky@stud.ntnu.no>]

Bob Bane <bane@removeme.gst.com> writes:

> I was particularly impressed with his last paragraph in the second
> article.  For some reason, he doesn't conclude that there's something
> wrong with C++.  Can't imagine why...

Hmm, I read the below as "There is something wrong with C++!".  Or were you
just being ironic?

> ---------BEGIN-QUOTE-----------
> 
> I don't know about you, but there's something really scary to me about a
> language where copying state from one object to another is this
> complicated.  By now, I suspect at least a dozen or two programmers have
> contributed something new to this discussion. If it takes this many
> programmers to write a simple assignment operator, think how complicated
> writing code that actually does something meaningful must be!

Bjarne Stroustrup often says that complexity is inevitable for a
programming language that is widely used for many different tasks and big
projects.  It may start out simple, but as different user groups gets their
stuff in, the complexity comes in the language, compiler, runtime system,
libraries and/or user code.  I don't know why CL isn't more popular, but
starting anew (arc, dylan) to simplify and change some superficial features
seems like a _lot_ of work and a good risk of ending up in the same spot
years later.  Everything doesn't have to be elegant, as long as there is a
known approach/idiom for expressing it. 


-- Ren�