C++ sucks

Ok, I admit it's rather an unusual title for the first entry in a blog that's supposed to go against the fads of the hour! Well, let me explain...

Lately, I was porting some code of a major telco player from their standard hardware to a new board. Admittedly, it was embedded code, but nothing hard-realtime an no microcontroller stuff - just a totally regular PowerPC processor.

And this code sucks! It's not even that bad, it's object-oriented and has some separation of concerns, but it's all huge classes, huge methods, no efforts to avoid repetitive code, lot of copy and paste: you'd think it's Java, with its lack of possibilities to invent some clever shortcuts and hide the boilerplate code! This was C++ code and it sucked: ergo does C++ suck? I've never thought I'd say that, but really, I've never been so annoyed with C++ code (or any other code for that matter). Everything was so straightforward, so a=b+c, so "churn out the LOCs", so unimaginative! It reminded me somehow of bloated, repetitive and vacuous Java syntax, but it was much worse than any bad Java code I've seen. I could just see missed design opportunuties.

Sorry, it shouldn't be a rant about Java (perhaps only a little bit about its syntax...) but about C++ code. The question here is: can a programming language stop an unimaginative programmer from writing ugly code? There are two canonical answers to this question: the modern one - yes it can, through a clean language design, and the oldschool, hardcore one - no, you can write garbage in each programming language. They have both both some merit, but my private view is a different one. I think, that with a language like C++ you can always hide the ugliness away, using the proverbial "additional layer of indirection", i.e. defining some higher level abstractions instead of thinking in straightforward, procedural ways. This is the lesson that OO taught us, and a basic one! So you cannot put the blame on the programming language's design, it's rather a problem of lack of freedom in your thought, of getting bogged down with the details, of fear of simplicity. I'm not saying here that you can write garbage in each language, as some languages are better at generating it than another. I'm saying that a better language is only one half of the deal, and we must add the another half.

Ok, but there's more to it. There's another aspect to the title of this entry: do typed languages suck? And further: is iterator pattern a sign of weakness of typed languages? Are design patterns just workarounds (like J2EE patterns obviously are)? But more about it in next installments of this blog.