Bjarne Stroustrup is catching up

Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of the C++ programming language, once famously said "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses". Interestingly, Bjarne has gone on the defensive in his recent lectures, completely changed his tune and is catching up with the conclusions that most former-C++ developers have arrived at.

In a recent lecture Bjarne made many eyebrow-raising assertions. He is happy that people are no longer talking about C++ because that means it has succeeded. In reality, C++ demand in the job market has been in freefall for years and few new software projects are choosing it. He attacked computer scientists for copying data and said that "even babies don't do that", a very strange statement to make in a technical presentation. He also implied that other languages deep copy 10,000x10,000 matrices and claimed that a shared_ptr is "like an old fashioned garbage collector except it gets resource release correct". Perhaps most interestingly the topic of his presentation was OOP without inheritance.

So C++ is moving from templates to the kind of parametric polymorphism ML offered before C++ was invented. Is the backbone of OOP, inheritance, being deprecated? And new features in C++ are closer to first-class functions and garbage collection.

Looking at "modern" C++ makes me angry. I wasted so much time learning all of this incidental complexity that just gets in the way of software development. And I am angry that so many people are still being deceived by this nonsense. Thankfully fewer and fewer people each year but where did we go wrong? How did we let this happen? I think it reflects a serious disconnect between academic and industry.

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