On Sunday, 3 January 2016 at 09:55:14 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
C++ was hyped up in the press and commercial sector because it
provided abstraction mechanisms on top of the existing C
infrastructure.
And just to give some context to this: in the 80s a large number
of programmers were self-taught and had never been exposed to a
disciplined language like Java as their first language, many
started with BASIC and machine language. At best they had some
experience with ad hoc structured programming in Pascal.
In the 80s it was not uncommon to implement applications or
portions of applications in assembly, and CISC CPUs like motorola
68k had a rather high level instruction set so it wasn't as
unpleasant as it sounds. One guy I knew implemented a full
fledged BBS system (Amiga BBS) in assembly because he didn't know
C and thought he might as well do it in machine language rather
than learning C...
In that context C++/OOP provided a new market for educational
books and magazine articles and lots of "propaganda". Which in
turn made C++ fashionable... It created a sense of "you need to
learn C++", yet in practice many just used it as C with inlining
and overloading...
