Re: Some errors in MIT's intro C++ course

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++,comp.programming
Date:
Sun, 19 Sep 2010 02:04:06 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<12fdf44c-a495-4418-86b4-8d95d991a639@w4g2000vbh.googlegroups.com>
On Sep 18, 11:55 am, Ian Collins <ian-n...@hotmail.com> wrote:

On 09/18/10 10:46 PM, James Kanze wrote:

On Sep 18, 6:22 am, Ian Collins<ian-n...@hotmail.com> wrote:

On 09/18/10 03:49 PM, Daniel wrote:


     [...]

Don't forget the biggest convenience of all: programmer availability!

When one of my favourite tool sets degraded to Java (and I
do mean degraded, it's memory footprint grew from about 50
to over 700MB!) I asked the developers why and they told me
they simply couldn't get enough skilled C++/Motif
programmers where Java programmers where two a penny.


That's an interesting point, to which I'm not sure I agree,
although I can see where a manager might think so. C++ is
clearly a more complicated language than Java. But some of that
complexity is there to allow it to solve more complex problems.
A programmer capable of solving such problems is capable of
learning C++ well. Less competent programmers have real
problems with C++. (I'm not talking of some of the critics in
this thread. They obviously are capable C++ programmers as
well, even if for some reason, they prefer Java.) Since
learning C++ well requires real skill, there are less C++
programmers, but the Java programmers who aren't capable of
learning C++ probably aren't capable of writing good code in
Java either (although they may know Java the language well).


Reading between the lines I think the true picture was more like "we can
get several cheap java programmers for every expensive C++/Motif one"...
  I think Motif was more of an issue than C++.


But who uses Motif nowadays? A GUI interface is either Windows
only (and you can get a lot of cheap Windows programmers---who
often aren't any better than the Java ones), or you use some
sort of portable interface (WxWidgets, QT, etc.). (My own
choice would be to do the GUI in Java/Swing, and use CORBA for
the C++ interface. But I gradually get the feeling that I'm in
a minority of one there:-).)

(Obviously, if you're implementing WxWidgets or QT, you do
program to the Motif interface. But that only concerns a very
small minority.)

--
James Kanze

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