Part of the Landscape
Where do you go to find out what’s “hot”? What is your source for the latest buzzwords or faux silver bullet? When a new technology, promising or not, snags its share of the limelight, how does that light make its way to your door? If you’re like me, you tire easily of hype machines that cry wolf about this or that whiz-bang tool.
If you’re like just about everyone, you get a large volume of uninvited electronic mail. That’s what happens when one fills out registration forms or makes purchases online. Even the mail I’ve intentionally signed up for gets a little noisy. I ignore much of it. What works will pass the ever-reliable “test of time,” regardless of hype. Such is the stuff of everyday programming.
Just as what makes news isn’t always newsworthy, what fades from the headlines isn’t always just yesterday’s news either. Do you remember when STL was big news in 1994? After Hewlett-Packard turned over the source code into the public domain, the media couldn’t say enough about it. STL isn’t “sexy” these days — not because nobody is using it, but rather because everyone is using it. It’s not news because it’s proven itself over time. It’s part of the landscape.
That goes double for the language that hosts STL. I can’t think of a single category of software applications where C++ does not excel. How about graphics? Ask Adobe or Mentor Graphics. Large-scale online commerce? Try Amazon. Telecommunications? Ever heard of AT&T or Ericsson or Nokia? Web applications? Next time you search on Google, you’ll be using a system developed in C++. Sun uses C++ to build the Hotspot Java Virtual Machine. In this issue, we’re excited to present POOMA, a groundbreaking, open-source mathematical template library from Los Alamos Labs that is sure to remove those socks of yours in Internet time.
Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++, has begun compiling a list of major applications built in C++ at <www.research.att.com/~bs/applications.html>, about which he remarked, “I couldn’t list a 1,000th of all major C++ programs if I tried, and this list holds maybe 1,000th of the ones I have heard of.” Most of us in the C++ community believe the language is entrenched far beyond what is presented in the media. If you have an item or two to add to Bjarne’s list of C++ applications, we have been authorized to invite you to please send the details to him at bs@research.att.com; it would be most cool to fill in the other 999 thousandths.
Meanwhile, CUJ will stand firm in its mission to be the first (and last) place(s) C/C++ developers look for day-to-day advice on building good software. We’re confident we’ll be working on this part of the landscape for a long time to come.
Chuck Allison
Senior Editor
cda@freshsources.com