...as my English teachers used to say.
"Finally, although the subject is not a pleasant one, I must mention
PL/1, a programming language for which the defining documentation is of a
frightening size and complexity. Using PL/1 must be like flying a plane
with 7000 buttons, switches and handles to manipulate in the cockpit. I
absolutely fail to see how we can keep our growing programs firmly
within our intellectual grip when by its sheer baroqueness the
programming language —our basic tool, mind you!— already escapes our
intellectual control. And if I have to describe the influence PL/1 can
have on its users, the closest metaphor that comes to my mind is that of
a drug. I remember from a symposium on higher level programming
language a lecture given in defense of PL/1 by a man who described
himself as one of its devoted users. But within a one-hour lecture in
praise of PL/1. he managed to ask for the addition of about fifty new
“features”, little supposing that the main source of his problems could
very well be that it contained already far too many “features”. The
speaker displayed all the depressing symptoms of addiction, reduced as
he was to the state of mental stagnation in which he could only ask for
more, more, more... When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder,
full PL/1, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could
turn out to be a fatal disease." --Edsger W. Dijkstra, from "The Humble Programmer" (ACM Turing Award Lecture 1972)
"This is the first Part of n, or lets [sic] say many entries in this blog. In
total I hope to be able to cover most papers in 3-4 blog posts, giving
the reader an overview over the suggestions and changes for C++ at the
coming C++ Committee Meeting in April. In total there are 98 Papers, so I
will skip some, but try to get as much covered as possible. I'll skip
papers with Meeting Minutes for sure, and try to focus on those focusing
on C++11 or C++14 features. As the papers are ordered by there [sic] Number
(N3522 being the first), I'll go top down, so every blog post will
contain different papers from different fields of C++ Standardization.
As N352-24 are Reports about Active Issues, Defects and Closed Issues
I'll skip them for now, also I will not read through Meeting Minutes and
such." --Jens Weller, from "A look at C++14: Papers Part I"
Plus ça change...
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