lunes, 24 de septiembre de 2007

Linus Torvalds y C++

Sorprendente la perla que nos deja Linus en referencia al lenguaje C++. No tiene desperdicio.

Dejo aquí una copia (el enlace aquí)

On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, Dmitry Kakurin wrote:
#
# When I first looked at Git source code two things struck me as odd:
# 1. Pure C as opposed to C++. No idea why. Please don't talk about portability,
# it's BS.

*YOU* are full of bullshit.

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot
of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much
easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if
the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out,
that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.

In other words: the choice of C is the only sane choice. I know Miles
Bader jokingly said "to piss you off", but it's actually true. I've come
to the conclusion that any programmer that would prefer the project to be
in C++ over C is likely a programmer that I really *would* prefer to piss
off, so that he doesn't come and screw up any project I'm involved with.

C++ leads to really really bad design choices. You invariably start using
the "nice" library features of the language like STL and Boost and other
total and utter crap, that may "help" you program, but causes:

- infinite amounts of pain when they don't work (and anybody who tells me
that STL and especially Boost are stable and portable is just so full
of BS that it's not even funny)

- inefficient abstracted programming models where two years down the road
you notice that some abstraction wasn't very efficient, but now all
your code depends on all the nice object models around it, and you
cannot fix it without rewriting your app.

In other words, the only way to do good, efficient, and system-level and
portable C++ ends up to limit yourself to all the things that are
basically available in C. And limiting your project to C means that people
don't screw that up, and also means that you get a lot of programmers that
do actually understand low-level issues and don't screw things up with any
idiotic "object model" crap.

So I'm sorry, but for something like git, where efficiency was a primary
objective, the "advantages" of C++ is just a huge mistake. The fact that
we also piss off people who cannot see that is just a big additional
advantage.

If you want a VCS that is written in C++, go play with Monotone. Really.
They use a "real database". They use "nice object-oriented libraries".
They use "nice C++ abstractions". And quite frankly, as a result of all
these design decisions that sound so appealing to some CS people, the end
result is a horrible and unmaintainable mess.

But I'm sure you'd like it more than git.





Linus

5 comentarios:

Anónimo dijo...

x'D sin duda linus siempre arma revuelo con sus declaraciones, debo aceptar que a mi tambien no me copa mucho la programacion orientada a objetos, soy un programador de C, y no lo cambio por nada, C y ASM (tal ves algun HLA) a muerte!!!
Pero eso no es escusa para dar semejante declaracion, sabiendo que todo lo que el dice tiene mucho revuelo.

Anónimo dijo...

Qué pensáis vosotros? Hay algo que se pueda hacer con c++ y no con c. Me fio de Linus?

Anónimo dijo...

Bueno, en principio, te digo que con C puedes hacer de todo, la cosa es que estas comparando dos paradigmas de programacion diferentes uno es imperativo, y otro orientado a objeto (c++ tambien seria imperativo), por lo que desde ya cuentan con caracteristicas diferentes, tambien uno es de alto nivel, y otro se podria decir que de medio nivel, ya que cuenta con caracteristicas de uno con bajo nivel y con alto nivel.
En resumen, C podras hacer de todo, que te cueste mas es otra historia...

Anónimo dijo...

pues la verdad yo nunk me he fiado de linus y pues de ninguno, creo que todo hay q pensarlo ad-hoc ya que todo depende, soy programador de varios lenguajes y los q mejor manejo son c,c++,java y c#.net y siempre hay momento para usar alguno, por ejemplo no voy a hacer una aplicacion web con c, o un programa grande en los que participan varias personas. anonimo2 (:P) tiene razon, c++ ofrece mas posibilidades, sobretodo para hacer programas extensibles y mantenibles, aunque no mas q c#.

Para serles sincero soy amante de .net, puedo hacer interfaces y programas grandes en c# de forma sencilla y ademas usar toda la potencia de ANSI C e intel asm.

Anónimo dijo...

En cuanto a los pros y contras de C y C++
siempre habrá opiniones de todos los colores.
En mi opinión, el tema de discusión, es si
Linus debería meterse o no en estos berenjenales.
Creo que una figura mediática como el,
debería medir mejor sus palabras.

Saludos.