>>17836I linked an interview with Alan Kay in the Java thread, where he also said very insightful things about C++.
>SF To what do you attribute the long-term love of Smalltalk? There is a certain set of languages that I would assert people seem to love, not just use. I know many people who love C. I know very few who love C++, even though they may make their living on it.>>AK You have to be a different kind of person to love C++. It is a really interesting example of how a well-meant idea went wrong, because [C++ creator] Bjarne Stroustrup was not trying to do what he has been criticized for. His idea was that first, it might be useful if you did to C what Simula did to Algol, which is basically act as a preprocessor for a different kind of architectural template for programming. It was basically for super-good programmers who are supposed to subclass everything, including the storage allocator, before they did anything serious. The result, of course, was that most programmers did not subclass much. So the people I know who like C++ and have done good things in C++ have been serious iron-men who have basically taken it for what it is, which is a kind of macroprocessor. I grew up with macro systems in the early ’60s, and you have to do a lot of work to make them work for you—otherwise, they kill you.https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523Even with the standard library and boost, C++ is a thin layer over C, which can face much of the same issues if you're not careful, including int overflows, pointer corruption and memory leaks. projectM-SDL had stack corruption that only surfaced when linked against musl libc, until someone groveled through their codebase and eliminated enough string allocation leaks for it to work.