And now for something completely different. . .
Our esteemed organ (as the London Private Eye often booms in its mock press-baronial editorials) has, from its inception in 1988, regularly adjusted its content and contributors to better serve and retain its paying subscribers. This new bimonthly column, I hope, will stretch that tradition [1].
Magazines are, of course, launched with titles that indicate the target audience. The title can be as mundanely focused and eternal as "The Pigeon Fanciers' Gazette," which requires only the masthead: "Dedicated to the needs of all those who fancy a fine plump pigeon or two." Breeding, feeding, racing, and, for all I know, cooking strategies vary over the centuries; but the publishers, cooped up in some shit-filled Shropshire attic, seldom receive threats to unsubscribe because the gazette ignores the growing parrot-doting community. Nor, indeed, would the occasional piece on parrots, hawks, and bluetits upset the readers unless they discerned a horrifying anti-pigeon trend in their favorite monthly digest.
As the main title, "Post-Mortem Debunker," attempts to indicate, I aim to offer a risibly skeptical postscript to the diverse programming-linguistic issues of interest to C/C++ users, whatever else you may use. After you've belly crawled under the thick red lines of syntactic barbed wire (see my movie Saving Private Pointers), past Plauger, Saks, Becker, Allison, Schmidt, you are offered a recreational (possibly re-creational) respite in my unstructured comments, a sort of incontinent-addressable, semantic bunker or noman's land.
My justifying qualifications for imposing on your finite read- space span include the mere accident that I have survived some fifty years (since my 1950s Cambridge EDSAC I baptism) of computational malpractice, malfeasance, maldistribution, mal de code, mal de mer, and all shades of schismatic argufaction. Less accidental, perhaps, is the fact that I have preserved a Liverpool-Irish sensayuma, protecting me, I pray, from the crustifying EOF (Extremely Old Fart) stereotype. It's a strange gene-pool with bits of Joycean verbiage floating around with Hamilton's quaternions. And, yes, I've read and partly digested P. J. Plauger's doctoral thesis!
My earliest connection with C/C++UJ goes back mumble years when the R&D in R&D Publications referred not to Research & Development but to CUJ founders Robert & Donna Ward. (This fact could win you big in some future ACM Jeopardy quiz.) Back then, I enjoyed regular conference stints as the tenured CUJ C-Pun Contest Judge, a constant reminder that "computer-humor" is an oxymoron not to be trifled with. Nor will I over exploit the "old soldier" stories: "64K? You were lucky — we had one bead on a rusty abacus..." One is reminded of the degradation of the term "legacy." Formerly meaning all those reliable heirloom bequests, the very essence of "inheritance," it now has the deflating implication of "I hereby leave you all my soggy 1401-payroll tabcards."
Lest you accuse me of exaggeration, I joined Mike Gurevitch to gainsay the inane rhetorical proposal "Is C++ Legacy?" a panel- debate organized by Sandy Rockowitz at the September 1998 Comdex Enterprise Show (Moscone Center, San Francisco). The implied agenda was the equally fatuous "Java versus C++," with Allen Holub and Gary Downing supporting Java. More on this in future columns where I plan to explore the effects of marketing hype and charismatic spokespersonship on the evolution of computing science. We often talk glibly of "success" (MyGol beats YourGol) without acknowledging the debt that each advance owes to previous "failures." Looking back, I offer you two disturbing indications that predicting computer-linguistic trends is forever beyond the experts.
From Peter Wegner, just before the C explosion [2]:
The demonstrated reluctance of the programming community [sic] to acccept a new language is due partly to the costs of a changeover, and partly to the natural resistance to changes in technology. It is due partly to the fact that programming language designers have not been able to come up with an acceptable compromise between simplicity and versatility that is a substantial improvement over Fortran and Cobol. However, a further reason may be that programmer productivity is not as sensitive to language changes as programming language professionals would like to think.
From Charles Simonyi, just before the Java Jihad tulipomania hit the fan [3]:
New language development has practically ceased, not because of a dearth of ideas, but for the pragmatic reason that legacy code needs outweigh any benefits that could reasonably be expected from new languages.
Notes
[1] Of course, the IBM Stretch supercomputer of the 1960s suffered the sarcastic fate common to all metaphoric appellations: Twang!
[2] Peter Wegner. "Programming Languages — the First 25 Years" offers 30 "milestones," from Programming Languages — A Grand Tour, 3rd Edition, Ed. Ellis Horowitz (Computer Science Press, Rockville MD, 1987).
[3] Charles Simonyi (Chief architect at Microsoft's Advanced Technology division). The Future of Software Conference, Newcastle University, England, October 1995.
Stan Kelly-Bootle has been computing on and off since 1953 when he graduated from Cambridge University in Pure Mathematics and hacked on EDSAC I (the first true stored-program computer). He is a contributing editor for UNIX Review/Performance Computing, and a Jolt Judge for Software Development Magazine. His many books include 680x0 Programming by Example, Mastering Turbo C, Lern Yerself Scouse, The Devil's DP Dictionary, and The Computer Contradictionary. Under his nom-de-folk, Stan Kelly, his songs have been recorded by Cilla Black, Judy Collins, the Dubliners, and himself. Stan welcomes email via skb@crl.com and his website http://www.crl.com/~skb/.