Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-june!uw-entropy!dataio!bright
From: bright@Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: Smalltalk-80 like inheritance in C++ possible ?
Message-ID: <1914@dataio.Data-IO.COM>
Date: 27 Mar 89 19:11:35 GMT
References: <110@honold.UUCP> <5481@rlvd.UUCP> <1411@sw1e.UUCP> <9174@claris.com> <1421@sw1e.UUCP>
Reply-To: bright@dataio.Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright)
Organization: Data I/O Corporation; Redmond, WA
Lines: 29

In article <1421@sw1e.UUCP> uucibg@sw1e.UUCP (Brian Gilstrap [5-3929]) writes:
>I find, the more I deal with C++, the more concepts I have deal with.
>I certainly realize that
>there is a learning curve to C++.  But It seems that there's *so* much to 
>learn.

I agree that C++ is a difficult language to master. I suspect that it is
also the wrong language for a novice programmer.

The more I work with C++, the more it seems a bit like calculus. It's a
powerful and elegant tool once mastered, but in learning it there is
no substitute for effort and work.

I've seen textbooks (mainly economics and business ones) that went to
great lengths with algebra to demonstrate something that could have
been shown with a simple derivative.
The effort to avoid calculus was substantial, and produced a mess of things.
The same thing has happened in programming. Some programs and packages
work very naturally in C++, doing them in C is certainly possible, but the
result is ugly, clumsy and bug-prone.

(BTW, I think everyone should learn the basics of Calculus! :-) )

The C community has been around for many years now, and has learned how
to use C and how to teach C. There are now universally acknowledged
do's and don'ts, including style do's and don'ts. C++ is a young language,
and judging from the code I've seen, the C++ community is still groping
about trying to figure this out. I have no doubt, though, that it will
mature and things won't look so inscrutable anymore.