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The US National Academy of Engineering has announced that Bjarne Stroustrup will receive the 2018 Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering for his creation of C++ while at Bell Labs. The language C++, to put it mildly, is widely used. The prize will be formally awarded on February 20th in Washington, DC.
Here is Bjarne's home page and his Wikipedia page.
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Bjarne Stroustrup to Receive the 2018 Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.
-- Lillian Hellman
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday January 04 2018, @08:06PM (3 children)
That's like saying that a gun that shoots backwards is "bad" because it's easier to kill yourself with it than a normal gun. Oh wait, no, it's just bad.
A tool that encourages damaging use by design is bad period (unless the purpose of the tool is to cause damage, which may well be true about C++).
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by unauthorized on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:04PM (2 children)
No, that's like saying a double edged knife is okay unless you hold it wrong. Just because you can hold a knife by the blade that doesn't make double edged knives bad tools.
A language cannot force you to use overloaded operators. It's a ridiculous proposition to say that a tool is made worse by having more optional features unless those features severely degrade the overall quality of the tool. Tools don't encourage things, they can only discourage and prevent you from doing things by inherently limiting the capabilities of the tool. You are no more encouraged to use operators in unintuitive ways than you are encouraged to hit yourself with a hammer.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:48PM (1 child)
A good programmer always uses refined taste and extensive experience when writing code.
SADLY, he must interface with code written by LESSER PEOPLE who will use every possible feature in the language to its ridiculous utmost.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @05:57PM
This is not flamebait.
It's an ironic reply for why one can't realistically restrict oneself to a sane subset of a language with so many so many easily abused features. Those features are an inescapable part of the programming experience because if a feature exists, IT WILL BE USED BY SOMEONE. Perhaps A LOT. Maybe even by you before experience taught you it was a "problematic" language feature.