Gconf or GSettings? - leading to a wider question

[Linus Torvalds]

On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 10:29 AM, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
>
> But then again, it brings us C++…

You can largely write C++ as C most of the time, so it's not
necessarily a huge problem.

C++ is problematic if you use the crazy streams crap, and/or STL and
boost. And the idiotic pass-by-reference, which means that now you
can't see in the caller whether the call changes the argument you pass
in or not.

And of course, all C++ people do that, because they've been taught
from early on that it's a good idea.

And that's often the real problem with C++. You *can* use it sanely,
but the C++ *people* are insane. The horrible template syntax, the
"stronger" type system that just makes people have to then add casts
to make it actually weaker than K&R C, the idiotic belief that streams
are a good idea.. And then they've been taught that "Object Oriented
Programming" solves all your problems, which is crazy (and causes
people to do all kinds of insane things to hide the details inside the
objects, and then invent absolutely idiotic models to transfer
information from one class to another).

But using a C++ compiler to just compile "extended C" is not
necessarily a bad thing. The problem really is that it's easy for the
crazies to then "fix" the clean code, and they'll talk your ear off
about how boost/STL/OOP/pass-by-reference makes all your problems go
away (except for all the millions of problems it causes).

So I think C++ is a horrible language, and has taught a lot of people
really really bad things. But it *can* be used well, if you are
careful.

I suspect the biggest problem with Qt is not the C++ part, it's just
the huge amount of work to rewrite all the gtk crap we've already
written.

                    Linus