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

[Steven Hirsch]

On Sun, 17 Nov 2013, Mark McDougall wrote:

> On 17/11/2013 5:50 AM, Theodore (Alex) Evans wrote:
>
>> Sorry, Steve, I have to disagree.  Those problems are almost
>> invariably better suited to being dealt with by C, or even FORTRAN.
>> The range of problems where OOP features are necessary, or even useful
>> is very very small.
>
> OOP is one of the most misunderstand, and more importantly, misused, 
> paradigms in computing. I tend to agree; people tend to look for a way to 
> bend C++ to their problem rather than use the most suitable language and/or 
> features for their problem.

I violently agree.  There is a lot of misuse and inappropriate use of C++ 
object features in the wild.  The team I work with is extremely 
experienced and leverages the language well.  You can go nutty with OO 
decomposition - or you can understand your data in depth and produce 
elegant code that someone else will have a chance of maintaining and 
extending.  It's like any other tool, it's not intrinsically good or bad.

> And a badly-written C++ program is worse than a badly-written program in 
> almost any other language (except COBOL, where a well-written program is 
> worse than any other language) ;)

Again, no argument from me.



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