The Real Truth Behind C++....
     
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On the 1st of January, 1998, Bjarne Stroustrup gave an interview
to the IEEE's 'Computer' magazine..
     
Naturally, the editors thought 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 was said, unedited, and 
unrehearsed, so it isn't as neat as planned interviews..
     
You will find it interesting....
     
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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 're-useable code' - when did you ever hear
        of a company re-using 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 treacle.  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:  Remember the length of the average-sized 'C' project?
        About 6 months.  Not nearly long enough for a guy with a 
        wife and kids to earn enough to have a decent standard of 
        living.  Take the same project, design it in C++ and what do 
        you get?  I'll tell you.  One to two years.  Isn't that 
        great?  All that job security, just through one mistake of 
        judgement.  And another thing.  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 $70 - $80 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..