Virtuality

Virtuality
It's like reality, but not as substantial

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Wednesday October 27, 2004

Imperfect C++

When my life was less cluttered and I seemed to have more time to myself, I used to go cycling regularly with a group of friends in West Yorkshire. One of the group, Matthew, was a PhD student at the time and the brother-in-law of a very good friend of mine. Over time, Matthew became a friend and we used to enjoy cycling together across the hills and roads of Yorkshire.

Since that time Mathew has made several bad life choices. On finishing his PhD he pursued a career in Software Engineering, actually choosing to spend his time writing C++! He then compounded all this wrong thinking by leaving Yorkshire and emigrating to Australia, the homeland of his beautiful wife. Now he has written a book about C++.

What can I say? Such promise gone so badly wrong. ;-)

If you are unfortunate enough to have to work with C++ source for any reason, then I can only recommend that you go out and buy this book (I will declare my interest at this point and say that I did review the book.). I can't say that I agree with every sentiment in the book, but it's well written and you are sure to learn lots about C++ along the way.

I wonder whether Matthew has scored an own goal on behalf of the C++ community though. Although his book is brilliant and certainly does show many techniques which can be applied to make C++ more usable; most readers are likely to be deterred from consideration of the language due to the complexity of the techniques required.

(2004-10-27 00:43:50.0) Permalink Comments [4]