
The Invention of C++ - hundredwatt
http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/Invention_of_Cplusplus.shtml
======
philwelch
(spoiler warning)

This is the old joke interview with Stroustrup where he admits C++ was only
invented as a plot to increase programmer salaries by making programming more
difficult than it had to be.

It should be pointed out that Stroustrup never gave this interview, and that
it is a parody.

~~~
dkarl
Even for people who are humor-deficient, there's at least one dead giveaway:

"Whoever heard of memory leaks in a 'C' program?"

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e4m
Even though it's fashionable to make fun of C++, I have to admit that next to
Python, it's my favorite language ;)

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jonsen
Reading comments first would have spoiled this wonderful practical joke.
Fortunately I read it some time ago uninitiated. Sure I was lured into
seriousness for a while. Then this-can't-be-true of course set in. I wouldn't
want to have missed that experience. As any practical joke, it makes one think
about the capability of ones skepticism. A capability worth keeping in good
shape.

~~~
uriel
The sad thing is how many people get supper upset when somebody posts this
somewhere, as if it was such an incredibly offensive joke, and as if you were
spreading some really evil lies.

If somebody does take this interview seriously, it says more about them and
about C++ than about the nature of the interview or whoever posted it.

And just because something is a hoax (and a rather obvious one at that)
doesn't mean that it can't be filled with deep truths.

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asdlfj2sd33
Regarding Unix++, I think the BeOS kernel was written in C++, and BeOS was one
hell of a great os.

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jacquesm
I think I still have the c++ preprocessor (c++ to c converter) here somewhere
that I first used to learn c++...

Time certainly flies when you're having fun.

Now lets hope nobody takes this 'interview' seriously.

~~~
dtf
Cfront? I'd completely forgotten about using that. Here's Stroustrup's own
history of C++:

<http://www.research.att.com/~bs/hopl2.pdf>

~~~
jacquesm
I've found a download link in case anybody would ever want to play with it:

[http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/c_plus_plus/cfr...](http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/c_plus_plus/cfront/release_3.0.3/source/cfront_3_0_3.tgz)

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wglb
This is funny, in a painful-yes-that-is-true kind of way. I am glad to be out
of the C++ business.

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jpierce420
I knew it was a joke, but the funny thing is that most of it is true...c++ IS
a jumbled mess, IMO. Sure, it made OOP popular, which paved the way for newer
languages to implement it more cleanly, and make it easier to use/think about.
C++ is good for generics, and native performance/compilers, but for some
reason i've just always used plain old C for performance/system stuff, and
another HLL like C# for OOP. I guess java is cool too, if you're on that side
of the fence, but I think its a jumbled mess as well...but that's another
story :-)

~~~
jpierce420
That sounds like I was bashing it too much...don't get me wrong, I respect
C++...its obviously very powerful and popular. But the fake interview was spot
on in some points. There's just way too damn much stuff in it for one
language, and on many projects, some of its features are used when they were
completely unnecessary, only adding complexity and tangled mess. It takes a
lot of time and effort to master all of its features, and in many cases is bad
for productivity. Also, it is a nightmare reading through a large codebase,
unless the project is very well designed and heavily commented.

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tptacek
I could flag this, but it's far better to get a metric for how lame HN is by
watching how high it's voted before someone else flags it off.

