Hello there, I’m back from holidays. Refreshing (actually a bit more colder than refreshing 🙂 holidays.I found this article from Stroustrup providing a quick glimpse on the next C++ standard. I know you’re holding your breath for my review of Design and Evolution of C++ and since I don’t want to loose any one of you two, you can start reading this. I found here the same guiding spirit and ideas that lined through all the book.
My favorite quotes:
– In my opinion, C++ has become too “expert friendly”
– Finally, C++ is so large, is used in so many application areas, and there are so many useful C++ design techniques, that we are all “novices” much of the time.
– I hope that after looking a bit at this example, your reaction will be “How simple!” rather than “How clever! How advanced!”
C++98 took several years, mainly because of a wealth of new things not existing before. This huge effort resulted in a large language and equally overwhelming library, capable of coping with most of daily uses of most of the C++ programmers. Unfortunately the effort hadn’t been equally spent on making things simple. The learning curve of the most advanced features of the language (e.g. the algorithm library, or the metaprogramming) is rather steep.
It seems that one of the main objective of the C++0x (where x is expected to be ‘9’) is teachability and simplification, so there are good chances that we’ll see definitive advances in these directions.