>There'd been a number of spectacular C++ project failures,
Do you have any examples in mind? Big corporate software project failures are always super interesting imo. Especially those that happened during such pivotal times as rhe 1990s.
Do you have any examples in mind? Big corporate software project failures are always super interesting imo. Especially those that happened during such pivotal times as rhe 1990s.
There were a lot of fumbling exploration into what kind of OO design would prove long term workable, and in what existed of the C++ standard library at the time, some classes, like iostream with its multiple inheritance and virtual base classes, may not have given particularly sound examples to emulate.
The arrival of the GoF design pattern book and of the STL were, in my opinion, massive game changers.
I think there is a talk on YouTube by Bryan Cantrill that gives some color on it...
Once upon a time, there was a company called Taligent, which was created by IBM and Apple to develop a set of tools and libraries like Cocoa. About the time Taligent reached the peak of its mindshare, I met one of its engineers at a trade show. I asked him to create a simple application for me: A window would appear with a button, and when the button was clicked, the words “Hello, World!” would appear in a text field. The engineer created a project and started subclassing madly: subclassing the window and the button and the event handler. Then he started generating code: dozens of lines to get the button and the text field onto the window. After 45 minutes, I had to leave. The app still did not work. That day, I knew that the company was doomed. A couple of years later, Taligent quietly closed its doors forever.
It is asserted a bit later than C++ was the problem.
Skip to 24:30 for the Taligent part.
Plus OO was at it's height as well, and C++ was seen as being incapable of handling OO sophistication, but Smalltalk could! (spoiler: it couldn't either) Then Java came and took over, and while it is a great language, it turns out massive, sophisticated OO approaches just breed their own complexity and so it picked up the "bad" moniker (it isn't), and now we find ourselves in other waters with a lot better understanding of everything, but still with a long way to go!