Bjarne Stroustrup on the Problem with Programming
A few extracts from a great two-part interview with Bjarne Stroustrup: Technology Review: The Problem with Programming,
More Trouble with Programming.
On over-abstraction:
Software developers have neutralized the astounding performance of modern computer hardware by adding layer upon layer of overelaborate [software] abstractions. We seem to have hit the limits of linear speedup for hardware, but in many cases, we could win a couple of orders of magnitude back from the software.
On “the next big thing”:
I don’t know what the next major conceptual shift will be, but I bet that it will somehow be related to the management of concurrency. As programmers, we have been notoriously bad at thinking about lots of things happening simultaneously, and soon our everyday computers will have 32 cores.
On .NET and the JRE:
I want my software to run everywhere it makes sense to run it. I also want to be able to change suppliers of parts of my system if the suppliers are not the best. Obviously, suppliers of huge integrated systems, such as .Net and Java, see things differently. Their claim is that what they provide is worth more to users than independence. Sometimes they are right, and of course some degree of integration is necessary: you cannot write a complete application of any realistic size without introducing some system dependencies. The question is how deeply integrated into the application those system dependencies are. I prefer the application to be designed conceptually in isolation from the underlying system, with an explicitly defined interface to “the outer world,” and then integrated through a thin layer of interface code.
Well worth the read.