Creator Bjarne Stroustrup
The Invention of C++ Language
How and why it is the way it is.
RIP 2011 Dennis Ritchie Inventor Father of C Programming Language
"Hoax interview between Stroustrup and IEEE Computer has been making the rounds in cyberspace. While we regret the incident, it offers us a welcome opportunity to have the father of C++ share his insights on Standard C++ and software development in general. We can also attest to his continued sense of proportion and humor-he suggests that the fictitious interview would have been a much funnier parody had he written it himself." -Scott Hamilton, Computer See real Interview
It may have been a hoax, but beyond the essential lie that it was an interview with Stroustrup, there's a lot of inconvenient truth therein. IMHO, C++ is a complex and powerful language that takes some effort to learn to apply well. Personally, since I've never had the time or need to make the requisite investment, I tend to avoid it's use. --Bob
January 1, 1998, Bjarne Stroustrup bs - research.att.com AT&T
Research,
Florham Park, NJ 07932-0971, USA
gave an interview to the IEEE's 'Computer' magazine. The editors assumed he would be giving a
retrospective view of seven years of object-oriented design, using the language he created. By the end of
the interview, the interviewer got more than he had bargained for and, subsequently, the editor decided to
suppress its contents, 'for the good of the industry' but, as with many of these things, there was
a
leak. Here is a complete transcript of what was said, unedited, and unrehearsed, so it isn't as neat
as
planned interviews. You will find it interesting...
Interviewer:
Well, it's been a few years since you changed the world of software design. How does it feel, looking
back?
Stroustrup:
Actually, I was thinking about those days, just before you arrived. Do you remember? Everyone was writing
'C' and, the trouble was, they were pretty damn good at it. Universities got pretty good at
teaching
it, too. They were turning out competent - I stress the word 'competent' - graduates at a
phenomenal
rate. That's what caused the problem.
Interviewer:
Problem?
Stroustrup:
Yes, problem. Remember when everyone wrote COBOL?
Interviewer:
Of course, I did, too.
Stroustrup:
Well, in the beginning, these guys were like demi-gods. Their salaries were high, and they were treated
like
royalty.
Interviewer:
Those were the days, eh?
Stroustrup:
Right. So what happened? IBM got sick of it, and invested millions in training programmers, till they were
a
dime a dozen.
Interviewer:
That's why I got out. Salaries dropped within a year, to the point where being a journalist actually
paid better.
Stroustrup:
Exactly. Well, the same happened with 'C' programmers.
Interviewer:
I see, but what's the point?
Stroustrup:
Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of this little scheme, which would redress the
balance a little. I thought 'I wonder what would happen, if there were a
language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market
with
programmers?
Actually, I got some of the ideas from X10, you know, X windows. That
was
such a bitch of a graphics system, that it only just ran on those Sun 3/60 things. They had all the
ingredients for what I wanted. A really ridiculously complex syntax, obscure functions, and pseudo-OO
structure. Even now, nobody writes raw X-windows code. Motif is the only way to go if you want to retain
your sanity.
Interviewer:
You're kidding. . . ...?
Stroustrup:
Not a bit of it. In fact, there was another problem. Unix was written in 'C', which meant that any
'C' programmer could very easily become a systems programmer. Remember what a mainframe systems
programmer used to earn?
Interviewer:
You bet I do, that's what I used to do.
Stroustrup:
OK, so this new language had to divorce itself from Unix, by hiding all the
system calls that bound the two together so nicely. This would enable guys who only knew about DOS to
earn a decent living too.
Interviewer:
I don't believe you said that...
Stroustrup:
Well, it's been long enough, now, and I believe most people have figured out for themselves that C++
is
a waste of time but, I must say, it's taken them a lot longer than I thought it would.
Interviewer:
So how exactly did you do it?
Stroustrup:
It was only supposed to be a joke, I never thought people would take the book
seriously. Anyone with half a brain can see that object-oriented programming is
counter-intuitive, illogical and inefficient.
Interviewer:
What?
Stroustrup:
And as for 'reuseable code' --- when did you ever hear of a company reusing its code?
Interviewer:
Well, never, actually, but...
Stroustrup:
There you are then. Mind you, a few tried, in the early days. There was this Oregon company --- Mentor
Graphics, I think they were called --- really caught a cold trying to rewrite everything in C++ in about
'90 or '91. I felt sorry for them really, but I thought people would learn from their mistakes.
Interviewer:
Obviously, they didn't?
Stroustrup:
Not in the slightest. Trouble is, most companies hush-up all their major blunders,
and explaining a $30 million loss to the shareholders would have been difficult. Give them their
due, though, they made it work in the end.
Interviewer:
They did? Well, there you are then, it proves O-O works.
Stroustrup:
Well, almost. The executable was so huge, it took five minutes to load, on an HP workstation, with 128MB
of
RAM. Then it ran like molasses. Actually, I thought this would be a major stumbling-block, and I'd get
found out within a week, but nobody cared. Sun and HP were only too glad to sell enormously powerful
boxes,
with huge resources just to run trivial programs. You know, when we had our first C++ compiler, at
AT&T,
I compiled 'Hello World', and couldn't believe the size of the executable: 2.1MB
Interviewer:
What? Well, compilers have come a long way, since then.
Stroustrup:
They have? Try it on the latest version of g++ - you won't get much change out of half a megabyte.
Also,
there are several quite recent examples for you, from all over the world. British Telecom had a major
disaster on their hands but, luckily, managed to scrap the whole thing and start again. They were luckier
than Australian Telecom. Now I hear that Siemens is building a dinosaur, and getting more and more worried
as the size of the hardware gets bigger, to accommodate the executables. Isn't multiple inheritance a
joy?
Interviewer:
Yes, but C++ is basically a sound language.
Stroustrup:
You really believe that, don't you? Have you ever sat down and worked on a C++ project? Here's
what
happens: First, I've put in enough pitfalls to make sure that only the most trivial projects will work
first time. Take operator overloading. At the end of the project, almost every module has it, usually,
because guys feel they really should do it, as it was in their training course. The same operator then
means
something totally different in every module. Try pulling that lot together, when you have a hundred or so
modules. And as for data hiding, God, I sometimes can't help laughing when I hear about the problems
companies have making their modules talk to each other.
I think the word 'synergistic' was specially invented to twist the knife in a project
manager's
ribs.
Interviewer:
I have to say, I'm beginning to be quite appalled at all this. You say you did it to raise
programmers' salaries? That's obscene.
Stroustrup:
Not really. Everyone has a choice. I didn't expect the thing to get so much out of hand. Anyway, I
basically succeeded. C++ is dying off now, but programmers still get high salaries, especially those poor
devils who have to maintain all this crap. You do realise, it's impossible to maintain a large C++
software module if you didn't actually write it?
Interviewer:
How come?
Stroustrup:
You are out of touch, aren't you? Remember the typedef?
Interviewer:
Yes, of course.
Stroustrup:
Remember how long it took to grope through the header files only to find that 'RoofRaised' was a double precision number? Well, imagine how long it takes to find all the implicit typedefs in all the Classes in a major project.
Interviewer:
So how do you reckon you've succeeded?
Stroustrup:
The universities haven't been teaching 'C' for such a long time, there's now a shortage of decent 'C' programmers. Especially those who know anything about Unix systems programming. How many guys would know what to do with 'malloc', when they've used 'new' all these years and never bothered to check the return code. In fact, most C++ programmers throw away their return codes. Whatever happened to good ol' '-1'? At least you knew you had an error, without bogging the thing down in all that 'throw' 'catch' 'try' stuff.
Interviewer:
But, surely, inheritance does save a lot of time?
Stroustrup:
Does it? Have you ever noticed the difference between a 'C' project plan, and a C++ project plan? The planning stage for a C++ project is three times as long. Precisely to make sure that everything which should be inherited is, and what shouldn't isn't. Then, they still get it wrong. Whoever heard of memory leaks in a 'C' program? Now finding them is a major industry. Most companies give up, and send the product out, knowing it leaks like a sieve, simply to avoid the expense of tracking them all down.
Interviewer:
There are tools....
Stroustrup:
...Most of which were written in C++.
Interviewer:
If we publish this, you'll probably get lynched, you do realise that?
Stroustrup:
I doubt it. As I said, C++ is way past its peak now, and no company in its right mind would start a C++
project without a pilot trial. That should convince them that it's the road to disaster. If not, they
deserve all they get. You know, I tried to convince Dennis Ritchie to rewrite Unix in C++.
Interviewer:
Oh my God. What did he say?
Stroustrup:
Well, luckily, he has a good sense of humor. I think both he and Brian figured out what I was doing, in
the
early days, but never let on. He said he'd help me write a C++ version of DOS, if I was interested.
Interviewer:
Were you?
Stroustrup:
Actually, I did write DOS in C++, I'll give you a demo when we're through. I have it running on a
Sparc 20 in the computer room. Goes like a rocket on 4 CPU's, and only takes up 70 megs of disk.
Interviewer:
What's it like on a PC?
Stroustrup:
Now you're kidding. Haven't you ever seen Windows '95? I think of that as my biggest success.
Nearly blew the game before I was ready, though.
Interviewer:
You know, that idea of a Unix++ has really got me thinking. Somewhere out there, there's a guy going
to
try it.
Stroustrup:
Not after they read this interview.
Interviewer:
I'm sorry, but I don't see us being able to publish any of this.
Stroustrup:
But it's the story of the century. I only want to be remembered by my fellow programmers, for what
I've done for them. You know how much a C++ guy can get these days?
Interviewer:
Last I heard, a really top guy is worth $80 - $90 an hour.
Stroustrup:
See? And I bet he earns it. Keeping track of all the gotchas I put into C++ is no easy job. And, as I said
before, every C++ programmer feels bound by some mystic promise to use every damn element of the language
on
every project. Actually, that really annoys me sometimes, even though it serves my original purpose. I
almost like the language after all this time.
Interviewer:
You mean you didn't before?
Stroustrup:
Hated it. It even looks clumsy, don't you agree? But when the book royalties started to come in...
well,
you get the picture.
Interviewer:
Just a minute. What about references? You must admit, you improved on 'C' pointers.
Stroustrup:
Hmm. I've always wondered about that. Originally, I thought I had. Then, one day I was discussing this
with a guy who'd written C++ from the beginning. He said he could never remember whether his variables
were referenced or dereferenced, so he always used pointers. He said the little asterisk always reminded
him.
Interviewer:
Well, at this point, I usually say 'thank you very much' but it hardly seems adequate.
Stroustrup:
Promise me you'll publish this. My conscience is getting the better of me these days.
Interviewer:
I'll let you know, but I think I know what my editor will say.
Stroustrup:
Who'd believe it anyway? Although, can you send me a copy of that tape?
Interviewer:
I can do that.
-------END-----------
g++ is known as a compiler, a program that will take your C++ source code and
compile it into a binary file that can be executed to actually run your program. This page will give you
the
basics on how to take a source code file and compile it into an executable, as well as show you some of
the
options you have when you compile a source code file.
typedef is a keyword in the C Programming Language and C++ programming language. It is used to give existing datatypes new names to make a program more readable to the programmer.
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RIP 2011 Dennis Ritchie Inventor Father of C Programming Language top
Dennis Ritchie, in Memoriam
By Andrew Binstock, October 13, 2011http://drdobbs.com/cpp/231900742
The inventor of C, designer of a universal language syntax, and a major contributor to UNIX died this
week
at the age of 70.
Earlier this week, Dennis Ritchie (dmr) passed away. The inventor of the C language and key contributor to
several operating systems died after a long illness. Even though he'd been sick a while, his death
came
as a surprise. Just a few months ago, I called his house hoping to set up an interview. I knew he'd
been
ill, but his administrator kindly suggested that he was feeling better and that with a little persistence,
I
should be able to work past his shyness and get him on the phone. There was no hint then that he was so
gravely ill. That shyness, or more correctly, Ritchie's desire to avert attention despite his
contributions to computing, are among the first things most people who knew him point out. Perhaps for
that
reason, he was often the first to poke fun at his creations even while recognizing their special place in
computing: "C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success." And, of UNIX, "It is very
simple,
it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity."
Behind the modesty, however, hummed a motor of remarkable technical creativity. C's clean syntax has
been the default syntax for most languages since it emerged in the '70s(!). Eight of the top 10
programming languages today (per Tiobe) draw directly from C for their syntax, including the #2 language,
which is C itself. No language ever has enjoyed continuous popularity at so high a level for so long. This
is due no doubt to Ritchie's intuitive way of expressing all that a system language need do. In the
design, he was greatly aided by his longtime collaborator, Ken Thompson.
During my recent interview with Thompson, he
discussed how Ritchie's work evolved as Thompson used it to rewrite UNIX: "The language grew up
with one of the rewritings of the system and, as such, it became perfect for writing systems. We would
change it daily as we ran into trouble building UNIX...and we'd modify it for our needs. It became the
perfect language for what it was designed to do."
What is not widely appreciated is how much of the C syntax was invented from whole cloth by Ritchie and
Thompson. C is generally seen as a derivative work from BCPL, but in fact, a quick look at the documentation of BCPL shows a very different
language, missing many of today's common syntactical constructs and all of Ritchie and Thompson's
minimalist elegance.
That elegance was then transported by Ritchie to the K&R book, which
remains the defining language tutorial against which all others are measured and from which all others
have
been given their canonical first example,"hello, world".
In UNIX, Ritchie was in charge of writing the I/O portions and some of the utilities. He reprised his
systems work in the ill-fated but innovative Plan9 OS in the 1980s and '90s.
Between the two stints, he and Thompson shared the Turing prize. In his acceptance speech, Ritchie foresaw
issues that have become serious concerns during the last few years: "More than anything else, the
greatest danger to good computer science research today may be excessive relevance...As the
intensity of research in a particular area increases, so does the impulse to keep its results
secret."
He then entered into a more subtle concern that remains a powerful but comparatively under-discussed agent
today: "Another danger is that commercial pressures of one sort or another will divert the attention
of
the best thinkers from real innovation to exploitation of the current fad from prospecting to mining a
known
lode. These pressures manifest themselves not only in the disappearance of faculty into industry, but also
in the conservatism that overtakes those with well-paying investments "intellectual or
financial"
in a given idea." Amen.
Ritchie saw in language what others could not see, in operating system what others had not built, and in
the
world around him what others did not realize. His insight and the elegance of his work will be missed by
all
programmers, even in future generations who, as he would want it, might know nothing of him.