Principles
Jamie Zawinski is a Lisp programmer, but most of his projects are written in Perl and C.
While still working for Netscape, Zawinski was supposedly known for his dislike of C++. There have been reports about him expressing his anger by throwing a chair across a conference room.
In his post-Netscape life, he continued to proselytize against C++. In Peter Seibel's book "Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming", Zawinski calls C++ an abomination. Furthermore, he believes C++ to be responsible for bloat and compatibility problems in Netscape 4.0 because when programming in C++ all project members have to agree on a subset and "no one can ever agree on which ten percent of the language is safe to use".
According to Zawinski, his dislike towards C++ stems from the fact that the language is too complex:
- When you’re programming C++ no one can ever agree on which ten percent of the language is safe to use. There’s going to be one guy who decides, “I have to use templates.” And then you discover that there are no two compilers that implement templates the same way.
Also, Zawinski criticizes several language and library deficiencies he encountered while programming in Java, precisely an overhead of certain classes but also a lack of features such as C-like assertions and typedefs. Despite the positive aspects, ultimately Zawinski returned to programming in C "since it's still the only way to ship portable programs."
Read more about this topic: Jamie Zawinski
Famous quotes containing the word principles:
“Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it.... Advanced art today is no longer a cause—it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.”
—Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)
“...at this stage in the advancement of women the best policy for them is not to talk much about the abstract principles of women’s rights but to do good work in any job they get, better work if possible than their male colleagues.”
—Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (1877–1965)
“The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being—which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs—where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)