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From: phinely@Hawaii.Edu (Peter Hinely)
Subject: Re: Will Java kill C++?
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Date: Mon, 1 Apr 1996 21:41:01 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.java:36676 comp.lang.c++:182129 comp.lang.smalltalk:36660

In article <4jno9v$css@newsbf02.news.aol.com>, Dogmat <dogmat@aol.com> wrote:
>>C++ is cacophony, not music.  ;-)
>
>Well thats a narrow-minded, dumb opinion (this is coming from a serious
>Smalltalk defender) and barely funny.
>
>Counter-point is that one person's cacophony is another persons music.
>I'll never program in C++, but I'm sure there's plenty of things its
>better at than Smalltalk. Technical arguments win over emotional BS.

If "technical arguments win over emotional BS", then perhaps C++ wouldn't
have gained such momentum behind it in the past few years.  While I agree
that one person's cacophony is another persons music, but it's hard to
deny that C++ has many aspects about it that really aren't so elegant. 
Twenty years from now, I doubt if people will look back and say: "C++, now
that was a language that was truly ahead of it's time."  I think
developers in the year 2016 will be amazed how slowly the level of
abstraction of programming languages progressed during our era. "Back in
the 1990's the predominant programming language for developing
applications encouraged pointer arithmetic, plus you had to manually
deallocate memory.  Programmers spent weeks tracking down "memory leaks"
as they called them.  Functions and classes were not first class data
types, and support for collections was not even built into the language.
Imagine that.  Of course back then "applications" then were huge monoliths
that tried to encapsulate all sorts of functionality into a single
program, but that's another story." 

