From: Christian Szegedy <szegedy@...>
Date: 2002-09-08T03:22:32+09:00
Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby

Denys Usynin wrote:
> 
>> As others have pointed out, C++ does not fit the rule "And just as 
>> with every
>> other language, once you have a feel for it, you can do a lot of 
>> things just by
>> pure intuition."
>>
> 
> I don't _fully_ agree(see below). A couple of years ago I  had to write 
> a relatively non-trivial project in C++/STL from scratch (not what I 
> normally do at work) that ended up being something like 700k of code. 
> While working on it I very seldom had to look things in the reference.
> 
> I think how often you have to pull your hair and go read the reference 
> is a good measure of how natural/intuitive/consistent is the language.
>

I think, a better measure is the satisfaction you feel when
you look at your code. Currently I work on a quite large project in C++
(around 50k LOC), but I am always unsatisfied with the solutions
we produce. And we think quite long before writing down the code,
so that it works well later. And still, there are always
surprises: sometimes compiler errors, sometimes language features.
The most common problem is that there are several alternative solutions
and each is somewhat unnatural and has its own special disadvantages.
I have almost everyday a surprise: how impossible is it to implent 
ideally something trivial. About half of our problems would vanish
if we could define iterators like in Ruby.

Regards, Christian