[Coco] Somewhat OT: The life of a systems programmer

[Greg Law]

I agree with this description of C++. C is a nice and easy language to use. 
The original C++ wasn't quite so bad, although it wasn't really anything 
more than a preprocessor in front of the C preprocessor. The C++ language we 
have today is such a bureaucratic mess.

On the other hand, both C and C++ are effectively what I call one-handed 
languages because the other hand is tediously stuck on the SHIFT key. The 
person that came up with the brilliant idea that constants and enumerations 
should SCREAM ought to be hung or something. Maybe I'm just old, but I can't 
crank out C/C++ code for more than about an hour before my hands wear out. I 
don't have this problem with languages that stick to camel and Pascal case.

-----Original Message----- 
From: Rich Carreiro
Sent: Friday, November 15, 2013 11:51 PM
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
Subject: [Coco] Somewhat OT: The life of a systems programmer

If you're done any low-level programming, and even if you
haven't, you have got to read this absolutely hilarious piece
from Usenix's ;login: logout magazine:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thenightwatch.pdf

A sample:

"Pointers are like Krackens—real, living things that must be
dealt with so that polite society can exist. Make no mistake,
I don’t want to write systems software in a language like C++.
Similar to the Necronomicon, a C++ source code file is a wicked,
obscure document that’s filled with cryptic incantations and
forbidden knowledge. When it’s 3 A.M., and you’ve been debugging
for 12 hours, and you encounter a virtual static friend protected
volatile templated function pointer, you want to go into hibernation
and awake as a werewolf and then find the people who wrote the
C++ standard and bring ruin to the things that they love."

--
Rich Carreiro

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