Remembering the Vasa!!

[Ian Joyner]

Did anyone see this article in The Register?

What's all the C Plus Fuss? Bjarne Stroustrup warns of dangerous future plans for his C++

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/18/bjarne_stroustrup_c_plus_plus/

I put in this comment.

I remember reading something a long time ago by Bjarne on the Vasa. I really recommend a trip to see it if you are in Stockholm – quite a sight.

I have been agreeing with Bjarne on this point for over 20 years, and C++ has been a top-heavy artefact for at least that time.

http://ianjoyner.name/C++.html

I'll admit to missing the most critical point (for 2018) that security is the elephant in the room for both C and C++ (and CPU/system architectures). Like most, I concentrated on correctness and verification, as well as other factors such as maintainability. Security is intricately tied to correctness, but rather than guarding a programmer against their own mistakes, it is guarding a system against the malicious intents of others. C and C++ can be too early undermined, and buffer overflows have proven to be the curse of modern computing, but blessing to the hackers.

But security is indeed the issue that should see C and C++ relegated to the past of the wild-west days of computing.

It is time for a rethink – or at least to learn the lessons from the past for good software development, even back to the 1960s, that C and C++ have wilfully ignored and spurned as 'restricting programmer freedom'. That attitude was naive, then stupid, now it should be criminal.

Ian