The D Language Foundation
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 11 months, 2018–2025
54:55 · 19K views · Nov 28, 2017
Scott Meyers' keynote at DConf 2014, drawing on 25 years of C++ experience to offer the D language community a plea about what it should avoid. It centers on the accumulated complexity and pitfalls of C++ as a cautionary tale.
HN commenters bring it up whenever C++ complexity or the pitfalls of language design come up, as a witty and authoritative warning.
11 comments from Hacker News
Yes, and everyone should watch Scott Meyers's awesome presentation at a D conference with the title "The Last Thing D Needs". (tl,dr version: The last thing D needs is someone like him, really to be so insanely convoluted, as C++ is, as to need someone like him.) Link to the video: this video
> C++ developers .. don't seem to be interested in actually improving the language In his talks at the 2014 and 2017 conferences for the D programming langue, Scott Meyers noted the difference between what individual C++ committee members say they value, and what the process actually produces. Will a new standard every three years make this better or worse? They do seem open to deprecating things that don't work. You might enjoy the 2014 talk, called "The Last Thing D Needs." I don't want to spoil the punchline, which actually struck me as kind of bittersweet, but Scott talked about the distinction that Fred Brooks made in "No Silver Bullet" between essential and accidental complexity. C++ does have a lot of the latter. Edit: link for the 2014 talk: this video and for the 2017 talk: [LINK]
> You cannot say the same thing about Rust. At least not yet. My fear is it's _very_ easy to fall in to the same trap as C++ has, and become a big mess. Scott Meyers have a very nice talk here: this video about all these traps and pifalls that we have to deal with in C++. That said, I'm starting a bit with rust and enjoy it so a lot, especially the tooling alone is worth it - and if I never have to write another line of C++, I would be very happy (ofc the real world argues I have a lot of C++ code that will need maintenance).
We Really Don't Know How to Compute: Gerry Sussman - [LINK] Zebras All the Way Down: Bryan Cantrill - [LINK] Jonathan Blow on Deep Work: Jonathan Blow - [LINK] Simple Made Easy: Rich Hickey - [LINK] Effective Programs - 10 Years of Clojure: Rich Hickey - [LINK] The Last Thing D Needs: Scott Meyers - this video
I'll just leave this fantastic talk here: The Last Thing D Needs - Scott Meyers (2014) this video The C++ type system really is quite... complicated.