The biggest obstacle to building software properly is fear. Programmers are afraid of losing challenge and creativity, engineers are afraid of losing control, and executives are afraid of failing. Many programmers worry that architects and engineers will usurp the creative, challenging part of their job, leaving them merely to code what they’re told. They worry that their jobs will degenerate into mindless drudgery, devoid of intellectual stimulation. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Software Practitioner Triad

Bjarne Stroustrup: You can program with a lot of free-standing classes. If I want a complex number, I write a complex number. It doesn’t have any virtual functions. It’s not meant for derivation. You should use inheritance only when a class hierarchy makes sense from the point of view of your application, from your requirements. For a lot of graphics classes it makes perfect sense. The oldest example in the book is the shape example, which I borrowed from Simula. It makes sense to have a hierarchy of shapes or a hierarchy of windows, things like that. But for many other things you shouldn’t plan for a hierarchy, because you’re not going to need one.

. . .

Bill Venners: So the invariant justifies the existence of a class, because the class takes the responsibility for maintaining the invariant.

Bjarne Stroustrup: That’s right.

Bill Venners: The invariant is a relationship between different pieces of data in the class.

Bjarne Stroustrup: Yes. If every data can have any value, then it doesn’t make much sense to have a class. Take a single data structure that has a name and an address. Any string is a good name, and any string is a good address. If that’s what it is, it’s a structure. Just call it a struct. Don’t have anything private. Don’t do anything silly like having a hidden name and address field with get_name and set_address and get_name and set_name functions. Or even worse, make a virtual base class with virtual get_name and set_name functions, and override it with the one and only representation. That’s just elaboration. It’s not necessary.

As an interesting biographical note, Stroustrup is a Profesor at A&M; I had no idea. Anyhow, the rest of this interview is fantastic.

Bjarne Stroustrup Artima.com Interview, Part 1

“I don’t want to be the guy that creates any kind of chilling effect on research,” SunnComm CEO Peter Jacobs told The Daily Princetonian less than twenty-four hours after wanting to be that guy. “I just thought about it and decided it was more important not to be one of those people. The harm’s been done . . . if I can’t accomplish anything [with a lawsuit] I don’t want to leave a wake.”

The folks who were going to sue the grad student over the use of the shift key to disable CD “copy protection” decided not to sue.

Re: From the Dumb Fucks Dept.

I added comment links to the bottom of each post. It’s all JavaScript loaded, so hopefully it won’t slow down the page. Anyhow, there’s something.