Bruce Eckel
Posts: 875
Nickname: beckel
Registered: Jun, 2003
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Re: Generics "Considered Harmful"
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Posted: Aug 8, 2005 9:30 AM
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Isaac:
> It isn't for me to disprove your personal criticism of
> Wirfs-Brock - it is for you to prove.
I might argue that you provided the reference to this article, at least implying that it was reliable, and so it seems that some of the burden might be on you to support your claim.
But to address your question, a second (and perhaps more glaring) flaw in the article is that in the "clone" example the return is by value. It was clear by then that this was a hand-waving example, and not one that had ever been near a C++ compiler, but if you need more, you can observe that in a further snippet a keyword was used as a variable name.
When I start delving into problems like this, I come up with compiling and running examples. Through the process of developing these, I discover much more about the problem I'm analyzing. It seems to me that this article decided what its conclusion would be, and then created examples based on hearsay rather than actually compiling them and analyzing the results.
> (Of course, we promote intellectual discourse by attacking
> the argument and not the person - we can try to show
> there's something wrong with Wirfs-Brocks statements
> without attacking the man.)
Point taken. Re-reading my comment, I can see that it did come across as an attack on him, which was inappropriate.
However, perhaps you can give an example of how to say that the article is full of errors without at least broaching the subject that the author of the article does not understand C++ at the same time that he is pretending to analyze and dismiss the language. I admit that it pushes my buttons when someone does this kind of pseudo-analysis and so perhaps I do come across strongly. But at some point I think it is safe to say that the author, at the time he wrote the article, had only a passing familiarity with C++, and to dismiss the article as unreliable.
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