Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mtcs!yates
From: yates@mtcs.UUCP (John Yates)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: C++ too complex!?!?! (vs. Russian)
Message-ID: <177@mtcs.UUCP>
Date: 16 Nov 88 21:49:49 GMT
References: <181@tityus.UUCP>
Lines: 31

> ...  The experience that I have with
> seeing programmers use C++ is that there is more rope than in other
> languages for their own hanging. It's easier for programmers to write 
> difficult to understand logic flow control in C++ than in C; one
> can always pretty easily trace program flow on paper using C, but
> C++ is more difficult.
> ... 
>
> -Jim Becker

I suspect that your problems with C++ programming may come largely from
poor class design.  From what I can tell (after using C++ for about
a year) it is often hard to define a good set of classes.  It is a
thing that a less experienced programmer will have touble with.  This
is also true in C, but the consequences are not as severe, at least
immediately.  If you design the internal interfaces poorly in C, you
can usually ignore them to get around the problems caused by the
interfaces being badly designed.  In C++, it is much harder to do this,
because the language is specifically designed to prevent it.

I think that if a program has well designed classes, then relatively
inexperienced programmers can implement them.  Furthermore, the
program as a whole will be better protected from the mistakes of a
poor implementation of a class than a C program will be from a poor
implementation of a program module written in C.

To sum up, I think that C++ is better than C for implementing well designed
programs, but C is much better for implementing badly designed programs.

John Yates
uunet!mtcs!yates