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0 pointsmattnewport7y ago0 comments

I've never really bought this argument. If you want to contribute to theoretical physics and be taken seriously it's expected that you have a solid grounding in physics. This principle is generally fairly widely applied. There are people on the standards committee who represent their companies and part of their role is to speak for the needs of the 'regular' programmers at their companies who may not be as well informed on the language - Titus Winters from Google takes that part of his role seriously. Bjarne Stroustrup teaches C++ to many students and one of his big focuses is on simplifying the language for beginners. To do a good job of simplifying something though you actually need to understand the problem space very well. Simple ain't easy.

If someone wants to represent the 'average' programmer then the best way to do it would be to educate themselves on the language and the current state of standardization and then participate as an advocate for those programmers.

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foldr7y ago

I wasn't talking about participating directly in the standards committee (and neither was the OP).

It seems that the people who are supposed to be speaking for the regular programmers aren't doing a particularly good job.

insulanus7y ago

> It seems that the people who are supposed to be speaking for the regular programmers aren't doing a particularly good job.

I agree with this. The people at CppCon are very smart, very informed, and very very pro-C++. It's silly to think that such a person (people on the committee, no less), would be a good spokesperson for your everyday programmer.

However, that's certainly not the main problem keeping C++ complexity high. Even though the committee genuinely wants improvement in this area, there is too much fear of breaking legacy code, and too many early design mistakes to overcome on the path back to a simpler C++.

mattnewportOP7y ago

It does seem that it seems that way. As someone who's pretty familiar with the current state of C++ and also has a long history in the games industry however I don't believe it actually is that way. I think the problem is more one of perception than reality but many of the complaints come from people who don't know what they don't know and I'm not sure the best way to fix that problem. The resources for them to educate themselves are freely available but a certain subset of them seem weirdly proudly stubborn about maintaining their ignorance.

I'm not personally that interested in making it my mission to help educate people who don't want to be educated but perhaps it would be a valuable way for someone to get involved. People complaining on the basis of wrong information or misunderstandings aren't likely to be taken terribly seriously though.

foldr7y ago

You're very quick to call people ignorant and make uncharitable assumptions about their motivations. If your attitude is the common one, then it does seem that the opinions of regular C++ programmers are not valued by the people involved in the standards process.

mattnewportOP7y ago

I'm quick to call people ignorant who demonstrate their ignorance. It's not even an insult - I'm ignorant about lots of things. There's nothing wrong with being ignorant about something if it's not important or relevant to you. However, if you want to get involved in technical discussions about a topic that is of importance or relevance to you then I believe it is your responsibility to take advantage of the resources available to you to learn about that topic so you're not ignorant any more. In my experience the C++ community is quite helpful and generous about helping people who want to learn but you're going to have to do a certain amount of the work yourself.

I'm not part of the standards committee nor do I represent the C++ community as a whole. I personally am not particularly interested in trying to educate people who don't want to be educated. That doesn't say anything about whether I or anyone else in the C++ community is interested in the opinions of regular C++ programmers.

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foldr7y ago

I wasn't talking about participating directly in the standards committee (and neither was the OP).

It seems that the people who are supposed to be speaking for the regular programmers aren't doing a particularly good job.

insulanus7y ago

> It seems that the people who are supposed to be speaking for the regular programmers aren't doing a particularly good job.

mattnewportOP7y ago

foldr7y ago

mattnewportOP7y ago

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