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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, adding object orientation to C requires the programming chops of Bjarne Stroustrup

I'm not sure this is true. You can get basic OO going on C in an afternoon with structs and function pointers. That is a very, very common technique in graphics programming (or was, before C++ optimizers got any good). ObjC is also a thing. The achievement of Stroustrup - and this is no minor thing, so don't think that I am discrediting him in any way - was he got everyone else to buy into his vision for a particular way of doing it.

Incidentally I recently attended a talk given by Stroustrup and he is a super nice guy and certainly doesn't think of himself as a genius.

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I watched Stroustrup be hideous to a member of the audience at microsoft's going native conference 2-3 years ago.

"I understand what you are trying to ask and I think that you are wrong." -- or something so close to that as makes no difference. While the audience hooted, laughed and razzed.

Right then it became clear to me why the C++ community is so awful. It starts with Bjarne who is /not/ a nice guy. Every other language community I've dealt with, C, Perl, Python, Scheme is more pleasant than C++ with their annointed "smart people" who stand in their circle while failing to discourage everyone else who, well, acts exactly like Bjarne did above. And just to be clear, Bjarne gave a lecture in which he pointed out linked lists are awful on modern hardware. The question was, "Shouldn't the standard library make the right decision for you if one is always wrong?" Whatever you think of the question or the appropriate response Bjarne was just being nasty and enjoying it like a school bully.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson apparently had some experience of Bjarne he spoke about.

> ...and certainly doesn't think of himself as a genius

This is intellectual humility. He's obviously a genius in his own right.

Yes and no. I would define a genius as someone who makes an intellectual leap that noone has made before. Stroustrup is a smart guy who just works very, very hard. As such he is an inspiration because he shows what an ordinary person is capable of if they work hard enough. Just my opinion of course.

Geniuses are often people who work at something for a long time until they slowly accumulate the knowledge and experimental results to make such a leap. After all, Lazy Geniuses don't achieve much, even if they have the potential to.

Alan Kay is undoubtedly a genius, I believe, because he made the leap to OO in the first place.

Einstein apparently once said that the big difference between him and less successful scientists was that he 'stayed with problems longer'.

And Edison, who I've heard (as a kid) [1] had said: Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

[1] When I was a kid, not him :) Parents and other elders used to quote it. A lot of truth to it.

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