From: Thant Tessman <thant@nospam.acm.org> writes
> Obligatory Ousterhout slam: The argument I hate the most from people is "X
> is better than Y because more people use X than Y." This argument is
> particularly infuriating when it comes from people like Ousterhout and
> Stroustrup and Gates because they are clearly content to perpetuate people's
> ignorance of superior alternatives, thus protecting their trump-card
> argument.
> (Not that it's their job to inform people of superior alternatives.)
An Hmmm. I don't know what - if anything - Ousterhout said to deserve
that label, and I find it hard to think of something significant to say
that applies to "Ousterhout and Stroustrup and Gates."
I do not think that I ever said:
"C++ is better than Y because more people use C++ than Y."
To repeat what I posted last time someone accused me of making
that argument in comp.lang.c++:
The furthest I go is to claim that unless C++ had at least some
of the virtues I claim for it, it would have died during the
early years where there were essentially no C++ marketing and
alternatives languages with marketing dollars behind them existed.
Naturally, even that is invariably mistaken for the disreputable
"5 million morons cannot be wrong" argument :-(
I recommend "The Design and Evolution of C++" (Addison-Wesley) for people
who are interested in what I actually claim for C++.
- Bjarne
Bjarne Stroustrup, AT&T Research, http://www.research.att.com/~bs/homepage.html
|