Re: SDL vs GGI

["Keith Lucas" <klucas@atlan-tech.com>]

>1- you're using C and don't care for C++
>2- you go to C++ and use it as a "better C"
>3- get the idea of C++ and use it correctly
>4- you taste dynamic languages and C++ now feel like your feets are cast
>in stone :-)
>
>Objective-C for example supports mostly everything C++ does, plus is
>very dynamic and has *real* runtime support. And I don't mind having the
>language definition dropped on my head from mostly any height. :-)

Actually I've been there. We were looking at doing some work in Objective-C to
run on Apple's last mythic revolutionary O/S,
but we gave up just before they did. And I went back to C++. I honestly think
it's dynamic enough to cause problems. Hell, most places still
don't the  dynamic typing it does have - "oh the compiler doesn't support it".
"Well throw the -ing thing away and get one that does". "We can't
do that!!! Using [some compiler] is part of our _strategy_."

They say this with a straight face.

Exceptions are a mystery and we're STILL, ***STILL*** at the end of the century,
when everything on earth depends on software feeding it or not dropping planes
on it, STILL, I'm looking at code that passes void* pointers around and hopes
it's casting them back to the right objects.

Believe me, people can get in enough of a mess without any help from
Objective-C. Most people on the planet can make a balls-up of
a simple VB program. I've had a chap here royally screw up a perl programming
task AFTER I wrote the psuedo-code for the entire damn thing for him.

I read C++ For Real Programmers and loved all the "here's how not to leak
memory" strategies. Tried them out, they make it practically impossible to leak
memory. You try and talk people into using things like that and they go "what's
wrong with malloc ? It doesn't leak all that much memory when *I* program with
it..."

Again with a straight face.



So basically I've given up. I'm kind of resigned to watching the IT industry
      flail about helpless in its own stupidity for the next decadeor so before
      the rest of species wakes up to the horror of it all and puts a bullet
      between our collective eyes, at which point I intend to become a writer...