XPost: alt.os.development   
   From: maxim@storagecraft.com   
      
   > Just think about the memory management of C. You remember? It is by no   
   >means   
   > a tiresome business, as a memory management does not exist. I can still   
   > remember the project manager I met in a project several years ago at   
   > Siemens. All the deadlines were over, nothing was working reliable. No, the   
   > problem was not C. They were "using" C++ but had "no time" to implement it   
   > according to OOD. Well, they had no time at the beginning. But I wondered   
   > where they had the time after the deadlines were over without a satisfactory   
   > result. When I came at 8 o'clock to help the DB implementer, there were   
   > already 6-8 programmers there. When I left at 20 o'clock, still 6-10 people   
   > were over there. And some of them in the evening were the same persons in   
   > the morning! So, they had time for a >12 hour job that is unlawful in   
   > Austria. It was "no problem" this time, no more "no time"...   
   >   
   > The project manager was responsible for the main fraim of the software, from   
   > where all the parts were called. And he had a lot of time to spend to find   
   > the errors (mostly memory errors) of the programmers.   
      
   Poor quality personnel is always a bad thing.   
      
   This does not say that C is evil. With more complex and high-level language,   
   these kinds of developers will just get lost in the language features, being   
   unable to comprehend them properly, and will use them in wrong ways, which will   
   create the same kind of problems.   
      
   > principles. All the classes were accessible from outside. The classes had   
   > optional subclasses that were pointed to by POINTERS instead of making it   
   > with a constructer & accessing it by references.   
      
   C++ references are evil. Their only real-world purpose is implementing the   
   lvalue-based operators like "operator []", which should return lvalue, and   
   "operator++", which should accept the lvalue as a parameter and update it. For   
   these functions, passing the parameters and return values by reference is   
   necessary, thus the references in the language.   
      
   In most other places, C++ references are evil. The proof: they do not contain   
   the visual reminder of deref at the place of their use. Compare:   
      
       void Func(MyClass& c);   
       // 1000 lines below   
       Func(c);   
      
   and   
      
       void Func(MyClass* c);   
       // 1000 lines below   
       Func(&c);   
      
   At the machine code level, they are the same. But note this good little "&" in   
   the second call, which explicitly emphasises that the parameter is passed by   
   reference and can be updated in Func(). In the first sample, this is not   
   obvious, and the code is lesser comprehendable.   
      
   > If one mixes up C & C++ code, the overall performance and stability will be   
   > far of satisfactory. But before I forget the point, let me state it: NO, IT   
   > WASN'T THE PROBLEM OF *THIS* PROJECT MANAGER. It is the problem   
   >of the whole   
   > software industry.   
      
   Correct, poor quality personnel is a really a problem of the whole software   
   industry.   
      
   >Half of the projects at Siemens cannot be solved. Most of   
   > them because of too long time-to-market. The reason is most often BAAAAAD   
   > PROGRAMMING. And not all the projects were led by this one project manager.   
      
   Then this is more an HR issue and not PM or development one.   
      
   > is a problem for software development. And it is a problem for Siemens   
   > Austria Program and System Engineering, as the latest news were that   
   >Siemens   
   > considers to close the whole software development, as "it is inefficient".   
      
   Their choice. Another large companies - like Microsoft, Oracle, Google etc -   
   have efficient software development (doing it in C/C++/C# mainly, not Ada or   
   Eiffel). So, this is the issue of _Siemens cannot organize efficient software   
   development_, which is mostly HR issue, according to what you described above.   
      
   With hardcore C++ or Ada or such, this kind of personnel will do another stupid   
   errors, mainly due to mis-understanding of the language features.   
      
   --   
   Maxim Shatskih, Windows DDK MVP   
   StorageCraft Corporation   
   maxim@storagecraft.com   
   http://www.storagecraft.com   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)