Re: Actually, there's more...
"Which is what Stroustrup is warning against."
Well, Stroustrup has been at the helm of this officer-run ship for rather a long time now, and whilst he may hae been worried that the vessel is endangered by its' own weight and ungainliness, the urgency of pronouncing that the thing is about to sink without trace has been largely msiing until now - previous releases have seen him mainly extolling the virtues of the often mind bogglingly complicated new features. Having to write a "Core C++" manual so that the junior shipmates can fight their way through the confusing architecture just to find the damn wheel is an indication of just how ridicukous the situation haa become.The real danger is not sinking, but that the ship sails on forever getting so full of stuff that all the crew have left without the officers noticing.
The fact that lots more features get added every 2 years means that the current complete spec is incomprehensible to everyone who's not a rabid C++ obsessive. I've been using it as a primary, then secondary language for over 20 years and it makes me feel dizzy looking at many of the new features from the last decade. The reason I've given up on it is not because the old stuff isn't still sufficient for what I need (it is) ,it's because I know what happens when people get their mitts on all the luvverly new features : they start using them. Unnecessarily. And really inapproriately and badly. And they don't document their code because "duuuh, don't you understand implicit virtual module template pointer type conversion autoboxing precedence yet you thicko?". That's when you give up and decide to quietly abandon C++ and make a living using something a bit more sane.
It's a brilliant technology for expert low level programming, but just too dangerous to let average programmers anywhere near it for any general purpose use.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
