Re: Garbage Collection - The Trash Begins To Pile Up
Andreas Huber wrote:
Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
And I do believe that the vast majority of the
engineers who crave GC (in any language) fail to see that, even with
perfect GC, the *mentality* that lead them toward GC in the first
place is will still be present, and therefore, even in a perfectly
GCed system, I would *still* be interested in taking a look at their
concoction.
You keep repeating this suspicion of yours (in various variants) and I'm
really curious why you have arrived at it? A technology is not normally
inherently evil, problems are usually only created by abusing humans. I
think GC is no exception here (especially not if it is added to C++ as
optional). Why would anyone who has concluded that -- in his particular
situation -- GC might help him create more expressive, better
maintainable, easier to use and/or better performing code have a worse
mentality (or less discipline) than someone who has not (yet) concluded
that? Do you really know all the motives why people want GC?
I look at their code. No, I have not seen the code of every C++
programmer in the world. But I teach both to younger people in their
early 20's, as well as one who had had 20 years device driver
experience. Like many of us, I have see a lot of code, both in
academia and industry. It is *extremely* rare to go into a corporation
and find that there is order in the code base. In many cases, the
first person to admit that the code structure was atrocious was the
Chief Technology Officer.
How often does this happen? More often than not. The sad truth is
what one poster wrote in this thread - there are people who call
themselves engineers (which I have no problem with) who are really not
engineers in the mind at all. They are more like people with technical
ability who do not mind being paid $100,000US/year to meander through a
problem. This is why none of these people will never be allowed to
build rockets - even with proper instruction in the principles of
aerodynamics, the rockets would never get off the ground. One must
have a system mentality to do something like that.
Now with coding, what happens is that, unlike in rocket science or even
electrical engineering, you get a huge amount of slack to get it wrong
and still be employed and considered useful. And this is where GC
comes in.
These programmers are not simply engineers who have cycles in their
beautiful structures and want GC to get rid of them. IF THAT WERE THE
CASE..I GIVE YOU MY WORD, I WOULD HAVE NEVER STARTED THIS THREAD. :)
What is more likely happening, with the vast majority of these
"engineers", is that they are making programs of bad form and the
*think* GC will help. I think it will not...BUT...that's not my
business. Frankly, I would not care at all what they added to their
language if it were not for one simple fact:
They will not be using GC in a vacuum while the rest of us go along
with our Yin Yang (constructor/destructor) model. Anytime you have to
interface your code with someone elses, there has to be agreement at
the boundaries, and this is where a class of mentalities will
inevitably occur.
So again, if my students and my colleagues had been wowing me with
their impressive ability to exercise discipline and not creating
systems that were slow, buggy, 10 times the size they could be,
indeterminate, redundant, etc...I would not be worried. I would know
that GC would be yet another tool they know they need. But that's not
what's happening. The software is horrible, and to many of these
people, GC is the latest diet pill.
I would like to issue an apology to all the programmers in this group
who *do* write good software and would use GC for those situations
where there is really no alternative. I would think it would be useful
to you in those situations. But I do not think that is what the average
programmer is after when they clamor for GC.
-Le Chaud Lapin-
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