Funny thing: some C and C++ programmers who swear they could never work with the parenthesized expressions of Lisp somehow have no trouble churning out complicated GNU makefiles with cruft like $(filter-out $(patsubst %,%/d,$(foo foo bar, xyzzy) ...) ad nauseum. Note how the parenthesis is outside the function name. It must be the dollar sign somehow softens it, plus the comma separators that are required after the second argument.
I'm a product of that cookie cutter system, its really horrible, in this case c# rather than c++ or java, I never got exposed to lisp until recently, but if you look at ruby as a kind of lisp or close to it when it comes to the web and startups the lispy coder as artist approach has won over the "software engineering" coder as inter-changeable component coder paradigm.
C++ was promoted by the Illuminati under the advice of a secret group of aliens to slow down the development of human progress. It achieves this via insanely long compile times whose purpose is stop anyone from getting shit done in good time.
I mean, how do you iterate and refine if it takes ages to compile stuff? The flow of your of thoughts has probably gone to shit before the compile is over.
Apparently the guys at CERN love it so much they created an interpreter http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cint for it. No wonder the Higgs boson hasn't been discovered yet (or has it?)
first the practicalities: CINT cannot and is unlikely to ever properly interpret ANSI/ISO C++.
In my experience, many people who use ROOT at least have vague feelings that it is making their life more difficult then it rightly should. Nearly everyone I know that writes code that other people use feel even more strongly that ROOT's poor design leads to productivity losses.
ROOT can't be said to be OO because it breaks the encapsulation in the guts. There is a massive usage of "g" global pointers : gROOT, gDirectory, gTree, gEnv, gSystem, gPad, etc... Around one hundred in v5-18-00, a disaster. And this definitely breaks the fundamental OO principle of encapsulation.
Then since ROOT violates three basic principles of OO (encapsulation, inheritance, virtuality) we are compelled to conclude that ROOT can't be considered as an OO software. ROOT is a bright example of people having jump to C++ but missed totally the point of OO. At least it will probably stay in the history of software because of that.
What could be the improvements in a ROOT major revision ?
o at least fix the name ! Is it ROOT, Root, root ? (Hell, we are pretty sure that any Bazaar model software have at least converged on that !)
o have then a correct namespacing of classes and libs.
o restore encapsulation (then get rid of the g pointers).
o revisit the inheritances. At least have a good histogram class. And arrange the storage area to be stable (then "fix" the TTree). And please, have an introspection class that looks like an introspection class.
o use pure abstract interfaces to separate domains. And stick strongly to the idea to have them pure.
Given that this is a topic nominally about Lisp, I'd like to point out that the CLOS crowd (Common Lisp Object System) would strongly disagree that encapsulation of the restricting access kind is a basic principle of OO. That's not in Lisp's DNA.
While it's true that indiscriminate use of global variables can turn code into spaghetti nearly as quickly as unrestrained use of goto, global variables do have legitimate uses and exist in one form or another in almost every programming language.
Lisp's version of global variables, dynamic variables, are both more useful and more manageable.
Common Lisp provides two ways to create global variables: DEFVAR and DEFPARAMETER.
One of the USPs of FORTRAN for a long time was the easy, native handling of complex numbers. Faced with that problem, I would have shrugged and said, use FORTRAN for that bit and bind it to C, easy.
If one day we all get sucked into some black hole and pop out on the far side of the universe, we will know that it was due to some null pointer exception in some C++ code at CERN.
Thanks for posting this.
I wrote a whole thesis about computer vision using Ruby instead of C/C++ [1]. Now I am working on computer vision with GNU Guile (Scheme) [2]. Not that I have convinced many people apart from myself about it ;)
I'm going to print this on a Louisville Slugger and bring it to architecture and design meetings.