Jamie Zawinski - Principles

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."