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Productivity? By a government agency?

This is not about productivity, it is about control.

On the 1st of January, 1998, Bjarne Stroustrup gave an interview to the IEEE's Computer magazine.

Naturally, the editors thought he would be giving a retrospective view of seven years of object-oriented design, using the language he created.

By the end of the interview, the interviewer got more than he had bargained for and, subsequently, the editor decided to suppress its contents, for the good of the industry, but, as with many of these things, there was a leak.

Here is a complete transcript of what was was said,unedited, and unrehearsed, so it isn't as neat as planned interviews.

You will find it interesting...

Interviewer: Well, it's been a few years since you changed the world of software design, how does it feel, looking back?

Stroustrup: Actually, I was thinking about those days, just before you arrived. Do you remember? Everyone was writing 'C' and, the trouble was, they were pretty damn good at it. Universities got pretty good at teaching it, too. They were turning out competent - I stress the word 'competent' - graduates at a phenomenal rate. That's what caused the problem.

Interviewer: problem?

Stroustrup: Yes, problem. Remember when everyone wrote Cobol?

Interviewer: Of course, I did too

Stroustrup: Well, in the beginning, these guys were like demi-gods. Their salaries were high, and they were treated like royalty.

Interviewer: Those were the days, eh?

Stroustrup: Right. So what happened? IBM got sick of it, and invested millions in training programmers, till they were a dime a dozen.

Interviewer: That's why I got out. Salaries dropped within a year, to the point where being a journalist actually paid better.

Stroustrup: Exactly. Well, the same happened with 'C' programmers.

Interviewer: I see, but what's the point?

Stroustrup: Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little. I thought 'I wonder what would happen, if there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with programmers? Actually, I got some of the ideas from X10, you know, X windows. That was such a bitch of a graphics system, that it only just ran on those Sun 3/60 things. They had all the ingredients for what I wanted. A really ridiculously complex syntax, obscure functions, and pseudo-OO structure. Even now, nobody writes raw X-windows code. Motif is the only way to go if you want to retain your sanity.

[NJW Comment: That explains everything. Most of my thesis work was in raw X-windows. :)]

Interviewer: You're kidding...?

Stroustrup: Not a bit of it. In fact, there was another problem. Unix was written in 'C', which meant that any 'C' programmer could very easily become a systems programmer. Remember what a mainframe systems programmer used to earn?

Interviewer: You bet I do, that's what I used to do.

Stroustrup: OK, so this new language had to divorce itself from Unix, by hiding all the system calls that bound the two together so nicely. This would enable guys who only knew about DOS to earn a decent living too.

Interviewer: I don't believe you said that...

Stroustrup: Well, it's been long enough, now, and I believe most people have figured out for themselves that C++ is a waste of time but, I must say, it's taken them a lot longer than I thought it would.

Interviewer: So how exactly did you do it?

Stroustrup: It was only supposed to be a joke, I never thought people would take the book seriously. Anyone with half a brain can see that object-oriented programming is counter-intuitive, illogical and inefficient.

Interviewer: What?

Stroustrup: And as for 're-useable code' - when did you ever hear of a company re-using its code?

Interviewer: Well, never, actually, but...

Stroustrup: There you are then. Mind you, a few tried, in the early days. There was this Oregon company - Mentor Graphics, I think they were called - really caught a cold trying to rewrite everything in C++ in about '90 or '91. I felt sorry for them really, but I thought people would learn from their mistakes.

Interviewer: Obviously, they didn't?

Stroustrup: Not in the slightest. Trouble is, most companies hush-up all their major blunders, and explaining a $30 million loss to the shareholders would have been difficult. Give them their due, though, they made it work in the end.

Interviewer: They did? Well, there you are then, it proves O-O works.

Stroustrup: Well, almost. The executable was so huge, it took five minutes to load, on an HP workstation, with 128MB of RAM. Then it ran like treacle. Actually, I thought this would be a major stumbling-block, and I'd get found out within a week, but nobody cared. Sun and HP were only too glad to sell enormously powerful boxes, with huge resources just to run trivial programs. You know, when we had our first C++ compiler, at AT&T, I compiled 'Hello World', and couldn't believe the size of the executable. 2.1MB

Interviewer: What? Well, compilers have come a long way, since then.

Stroustrup: They have? Try it on the latest version of g++ - you won't get much change out of half a megabyte. Also, there are several quite recent examples for you, from all over the world. British Telecom had a major disaster on their hands but, luckily, managed to scrap the whole thing and start again. They were luckier than Australian Telecom. Now I hear that Siemens is building a dinosaur, and getting more and more worried as the size of the hardware gets bigger, to accommodate the executables. Isn't multiple inheritance a joy?

Interviewer: Yes, but C++ is basically a sound language.

Stroustrup: You really believe that, don't you? Have you ever sat down and worked on a C++ project? Here's what happens: First, I've put in enough pitfalls to make sure that only the most trivial projects will work first time. Take operator overloading. At the end of the project, almost every module has it, usually, because guys feel they really should do it, as it was in their training course. The same operator then means something totally different in every module. Try pulling that lot together, when you have a hundred or so modules. And as for data hiding. God, I sometimes can't help laughing when I hear about the problems companies have making their modules talk to each other. I think the word 'synergistic' was specially invented to twist the knife in a project manager's ribs.

Interviewer: I have to say, I'm beginning to be quite appalled at all this. You say you did it to raise programmers' salaries? That's obscene.

Stroustrup: Not really. Everyone has a choice. I didn't expect the thing to get so much out of hand. Anyway, I basically succeeded. C++ is dying off now, but programmers still get high salaries - especially those poor devils who have to maintain all this crap. You do realise, it's impossible to maintain a large C++ software module if you didn't actually write it?

Interviewer: How come?

Stroustrup: You are out of touch, aren't you? Remember the typedef?

Interviewer: Yes, of course.

Stroustrup: Remember how long it took to grope through the header files only to find that 'RoofRaised' was a double precision number? Well, imagine how long it takes to find all the implicit typedefs in all the Classes in a major project.

Interviewer: So how do you reckon you've succeeded?

Stroustrup: Remember the length of the average-sized 'C' project? About 6 months. Not nearly long enough for a guy with a wife and kids to earn enough to have a decent standard of living. Take the same project, design it in C++ and what do you get? I'll tell you. One to two years. Isn't that great? All that job security, just through one mistake of judgement. And another thing. The universities haven't been teaching 'C' for such a long time, there's now a shortage of decent 'C' programmers. Especially those who know anything about Unix systems programming. How many guys would know what to do with 'malloc', when they've used 'new' all these years - and never bothered to check the return code. In fact, most C++ programmers throw away their return codes. Whatever happened to good ol' '-1'? At least you knew you had an error, without bogging the thing down in all that 'throw' 'catch' 'try' stuff.

Interviewer: But, surely, inheritance does save a lot of time?

Stroustrup: does it? Have you ever noticed the difference between a 'C' project plan, and a C++ project plan? The planning stage for a C++ project is three times as long. Precisely to make sure that everything which should be inherited is, and what shouldn't isn't. Then, they still get it wrong. Whoever heard of memory leaks in a 'C' program? Now finding them is a major industry. Most companies give up, and send the product out, knowing it leaks like a sieve, simply to avoid the expense of tracking them all down.

Interviewer: There are tools...

Stroustrup: Most of which were written in C++.

Interviewer: If we publish this, you'll probably get lynched, you do realise that?

Stroustrup: I doubt it. As I said, C++ is way past its peak now, and no company in its right mind would start a C++ project without a pilot trial. That should convince them that it's the road to disaster. If not, they deserve all they get. You know, I tried to convince Dennis Ritchie to rewrite Unix inC++.

Interviewer: Oh my God. What did he say?

Stroustrup: Well, luckily, he has a good sense of humor. I think both he and Brian figured out what I was doing, in the early days, but never let on. He said he'd help me write a C++ version of DOS, if I was interested.

Interviewer: Were you?

Stroustrup: Actually, I did write DOS in C++, I'll give you a demo when we're through. I have it running on a Sparc 20 in the computer room. Goes like a rocket on 4 CPU's, and only takes up 70 megs of disk.

Interviewer: What's it like on a PC?

Stroustrup: Now you're kidding. Haven't you ever seen Windows '95? I think of that as my biggest success. Nearly blew the game before I was ready, though.

Interviewer: You know, that idea of a Unix++ has really got me thinking. Somewhere out there, there's a guy going to try it.

Stroustrup: Not after they read this interview.

Interviewer: I'm sorry, but I don't see us being able to publish any of this.

Stroustrup: But it's the story of the century. I only want to be remembered by my fellow programmers, for what I've done for them. You know how much a C++ guy can get these days?

Interviewer: Last I heard, a really top guy is worth $70 - $80 an hour.

Stroustrup: See? And I bet he earns it. Keeping track of all the gotchas I put into C++ is no easy job. And, as I said before, every C++ programmer feels bound by some mystic promise to use every damn element of the language on every project. Actually, that really annoys me sometimes, even though it serves my original purpose. I almost like the language after all this time.

Interviewer: You mean you didn't before?

Stroustrup: Hated it. It even looks clumsy, don't you agree? But when the book royalties started to come in... well, you get the picture.

Interviewer: Just a minute. What about references? You must admit, you improved on 'C' pointers.

Stroustrup: Hmm. I've always wondered about that. Originally, I thought I had. Then, one day I was discussing this with a guy who'd written C++ from the beginning. He said he could never remember whether his variables were referenced or dereferenced, so he always used pointers. He said the little asterisk always reminded him.

Interviewer: Well, at this point, I usually say 'thank you very much' but it hardly seems adequate.

Stroustrup: Promise me you'll publish this. My conscience is getting the better of me these days.

Interviewer: I'll let you know, but I think I know what my editor will say.

Stroustrup: Who'd believe it anyway? Although, can you send me a copy of that tape?

Interviewer: I can do that.

The FBI's geeks admitted they were nervous over computer-generated images at a recent forensics conference. In court they're now arguing that a jury "can tell" if an image is real or computer-generated — which marks the current boundary between legal and illegal. But reporter Debbie Nathan argues that that distinction is getting fuzzy, and that geeks will inevitably make it obsolete.
http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2008/06/05/is-it-legal-porn-or-illegal-porn/

Microsoft has never been about the customer. Microsoft will gladly screw over their customers to get a few bucks or gain marketshare.

Here's an old but great example. Back when Win95 was released you could not natively use long file names with 16-bit apps. However, there was a product called "Name-It!" which did allow that function. In other words it was possible and quite easy to enable the function, but Microsoft chose NOT to implement it. Why? Because long file names was a well liked feature among customers and denying it to customers would give incentive to upgrade to new 32-bit programs.

Another great example is Messenger, the chat program not the service. Microsoft originally made it nearly impossible to get rid of. Even if you edited your sysoc.inf file and uninstalled Messenger, it'll suddenly come back. Even if you deleted the subfolder under Program Files, it would mysteriously come back. Obviously Microsoft considered its chat war against AOL more important than ease of use for its customers.

And of course there's product activation. We were told it was to stop piracy, but that was bull-shit. You can easy obtain pirated copies of XP and Vista. Let's face it, if piracy has been decreased, then why is Vista Microsoft's most expensive OS? Why aren't they passing the savings back to us? Clearly product activation is not stopping piracy at all. Once again, the real purpose of product activation is to screw over the paying customer who wants to install the OS he paid for on both of his systems.

And lets not forget how Microsoft's Office products are constantly screwing with file formats to make the later versions incompatible with earlier versions. Once again, this is NOT done to make it easier for paying customers. It's merely leverage to get those customer paying again and again.

It'd be really hard to be passionate for Microsoft's products. It's hard to be passionate for anything that nickel and dimes you at every turn. That treats you like a criminal. And sees you merely as a cash cow to be milked at every chance.

Christopher Blanc writes "The other reason that the cover pictures are significant is that since my original goal in writing the programs was to impress my girlfriend, the cover pictures are therefore part of the output of the most successful Perl programs I've ever written. I wish all my programs achieved their design goals so spectacularly.

http://hop.perl.plover.com/cover.html"
http://hop.perl.plover.com/cover.html

The Freenet Project has announced Freenet 0.7.0rc2. From the announcement: "Freenet is a global peer-to-peer network designed to allow users to publish and consume information without fear of censorship. Freenet 0.7 is a ground-up rewrite of Freenet. The key user-facing feature in Freenet 0.7 is the ability to operate Freenet in a "darknet" mode, where your Freenet node will only talk to other Freenet users that you trust. This makes it much more difficult for an adversary to discover that you are using Freenet, let alone what you are doing with it. 0.7 also includes significant improvements to both security and performance." Of course, for those of us who don't know anyone else running Freenet, or simply prefer it, there's also a non-darknet mode available.

An anonymous reader writes "The Seattle Times has an article "Border Patrol "spot checks" on ferries provoke outrage in San Juan Islands" [I]n February, when federal agents started corralling everyone off domestic ferries into a fenced-off area in Anacortes and questioning them about their citizenship. It now happens once, maybe twice a week; no one has any way to know if they will be stopped.

The article goes on further, As for residents who refuse to cooperate or answer questions, Giuliano [the Border Patrol's deputy chief patrol agent for the Blaine border sector] said, agents will still run their license-plate numbers and search databases, detaining them until it can be determined whether they are here legally.

Anybody remember the movie, "Born in East L.A.?""
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004364797_ferrypatrol22m.html?syndication=rss

cashman73 writes "I recently came across this article from the February 27, 1995, issue of Newsweek. In it, Clifford Stoll discusses this "new" thing that was just becoming popular at the time, known as the Internet. And proceeds to tell us why it will never really change society and the way in which we live. While he did get a few things right, like more or less correctly describing Usenet as a, "cacophany [that] more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harassment, and anonymous threats", he was dead wrong on others. For example, he didn't see that we'd ever replace newspapers with internet websites, or that we'd ever purchase and read books online (a la Amazon & Kindle). He described reading a book online as, "an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach."

He also described the internet as a, "wasteland of unfiltered data", and told us about this difficulties in trying to hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar, in the pre-Google and pre-Wikipedia era. And then he talks about the failures of the internet in the realm of political campaigning, citing one local government official who put up all his campaign releases online, only to get 30 hits. How shocked he must be today, seeing websites for every major political candidate, from US President on down to local city mayor elections, not to forget about all of the video out there, like the CNN/Youtube debates!

His comments on computers in the classroom were sort of a mixed bag, stating that computers will never replace teachers, but also failing to see how computers will be utilized in the classroom today.

In the end, the thing he argues most as the reason why this new internet thing would never really take off, is the lack of human contact, citing that computer networks isolated us more. He even goes on to say that a, "network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee." Which is interesting because, while he makes a valid point about the lack of in-person contact via the internet, he failed to predict that those same friends that met over coffee in 1995, would still be meeting for coffee today AND accessing the internet via the coffee shop's wireless internet to chat with other friends online."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "President Bush recently held a news conference demanding that Congress hurry up and pass a FISA bill that gives telecoms retroactive immunity for their crimes, claiming that 'their assistance was legal and vital to national security'. Without legal authorization to continue, 'we cannot protect our country from terrorist attack'. He also vowed to continue speaking on the matter until the American people understand. Sen. Kennedy replied that 'Adhering to the rule of law would not "aid our enemies" — it would uphold the very principles we are fighting for.'"
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/washington/28cnd-bush.html?ref=business

jfruhlinger writes "For any integration project, it's customary for techies to start with technology quesitons: "Let's use Web services!" "Let's use REST!" "Let's use .NET!" But Sean McGrath says that there are other questions that need to be resolved first: if data's going from system A to system B, which copy is the master? Who's driving the process? And who's to blame if something goes wrong?"
http://www.itworld.com/Man/decision-tree-logic-nlstipsm-080222/index.html

The Times Online has an article about the Children's Commissioner in the UK wants to ban a pioneering device that uses high-frequency sound to stop teenagers congregating outside shops, schools and railway stations. This device admits a sound aimed directly towards teens and people in their early 20's that still have good hearing. Sir Albert Aynsley-Green, the Children's Commissioner for England states "These devices are indiscriminate and target all children and young people, including babies, regardless of whether they are behaving or misbehaving, the use of measures such as these are simply demonising children and young people, creating a dangerous and widening divide between the young and the old. This device is a quick fix. It's not tackling the root of the problem and it's indiscriminate." The campaign has won the support of human rights groups including Liberty, whose director, Shami Chakrabarti, described it as a "sonic weapon directed against children and young people" But Simon Morris, commercial director of Compound Security Systems, which created and markets the Mosquito, today defended it and questioned the motivation of the campaign to ban it. "Our opinion — and unless Ms Chakrabarti has managed to change the legislation we still have free speech — is that Liberty is being more discriminatory in this campaign than anyone using the Mosquito," he said. "They are not willing to consider the victims of anti-social behaviour," Morris says.

According to this CBC article, "Canada has joined Russia and China as the biggest violators of U.S. copyright law, according to the U.S.-based International Intellectual Property Alliance."

The story goes on to say that, "The group's report is the latest to urge the U.S. government into pressuring Ottawa to reform copyright laws." As previously reported on Slashdot, the current Conservative government had planned to introduce a new copyright law, but dissent from the privacy commissioner and a groundswell of public protest delayed that action.

What makes this story so important, now, is that this pressure is being applied at a time and in a manner that may force the Canadian government to fall, forcing an election.

A new competitive sport is emerging amongst IT professionals and hobbyists. Speedcabling tests the ability to untangle the rat's nests that grow inside and outside of the beige boxes that pervade todays homes and workplaces. The first public competition was held in an LA gallery for a $50 gift certificate to a local Italian restaurant. The winner, LA web developer Matthew Howell, had to untangle a dozen ethernet cables in record time leaving them in working order to win.

Robotech_Master writes "According to the article, since MySpace was acquired by Rupert Murdoch it has deleted a 35,000 member atheist/agnostic group, reportedly "the largest collection of organized atheists in the world." Some individual atheists' profiles have also been deleted. Bryan Pesta, Ph.D., the group's moderator, has an updates page."
http://www.secularstudents.org/node/1933

News.com.au reports that Australian Federal Police chief Mick Keelty has called for a media blackout on reporting of terrorism investigations and cases before trial in a speech to the Sydney Institute last night. Although he doesn't believe public institutions be immune from public accountability, he goes on to say that public discussion should be delayed until information is made available by the courts or legal proceedings are complete. This all comes after last years widely reported case of Dr. Mohammed Haneef who was detained then later deported from Australia on evidence described as weak — and seen by some including Haneef as a conspiracy.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23131030-421,00.html