On Tuesday, 29 May 2018 at 23:55:07 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
Which is ironic considering...
Ken Thomson : " Stroustrup campaigned for years and years and
years, way beyond any sort of technical contributions he made
to the language, to get it adopted and used. And he sort of ran
all the standards committees with a whip and a chair. And he
said “no” to no one. He put every feature in that language that
ever existed. It wasn’t cleanly designed—it was just the union
of everything that came along. And I think it suffered
drastically from that."
Donald Knuth : "Whenever the C++ language designers had two
competing ideas as to how they should solve some problem, they
said "OK, we'll do them both". So the language is too baroque
for my taste."
good old Ken and Don are from a generation where you could
(typically) understand the whole langauge.
those times have passed. no really.. they have...I'm not
kidding...
It is now just complete nonsense that one person should be able
to understand a modern programming langauge. At best, they will
understand some of it.
These days, it must be about collaboration - which is something D
suffers from not having, due to people believing that they should
be able to understand it all, and therefore progress should stop
when this no longer becomes possible.
That is essentially a human-ego driven perspective, that holds
back progress.
Progress in modern times requires collaboration. People who know
and understand parts, connecting and collaborating with people
who know and understand other parts.
That is the way the C++ design by committee works. It might not
be perfect, but its much better than having a King that you
cannot say 'no' too (ie Vasa), or a King that always says 'no' to
the people.
D needs more collaborators, and less kings.
