Re: Herbert Schildt, author of The Complete C++ Reference (NOT C Unleashed) rehabilitated on wikipedia

The problem as I see it is that standards can be written, today, by
people who've not written code in the language...

As you see? How much facts do you have at your disposal to make such a
conclusion?
I knew some of the people that formed part of original 1990 ISO C standard
committee.
And some of those people represented compiler vendors (and were the actual
programmers).
Representatives from Microsoft, Borland, Watcom were there (as well as
others from non-PC backgrounds)
So it is more Nilge nonsense to talk about "people who've not written code
in the language".
Borland got to the point where they were updating their compilers a few
hours after a meeting ended with descisions made :-)
Some were hardware vendors: IBM, Sun, DEC,...

, nor seem to have ever
written a compiler

<guffaw> Your ignorance is showing every other line. Your making an utter
total fool of yourself.
I will have to go and count all the compiler vendors in the original 1990
ISO C standard committee.
It is certainly not 0 as you seem to think.
See previous paragraphs...

It appears even more clear, then, that Schildt's real crime was that
he taught real people how to program as opposed to getting promoted
into management and onto standards committees...

No. Schildt has been peddling C & C++ books with errors as long as I can
remember.
What is the point of teaching "real people" if what you say is an error?

For the past 10 years, a phase has entered the lexicon of programmers and
that is "Best Practice"
"Best Practice" is the collected distilled wisdom for using a particular
language or technology such that your programs are likely to have few
errors, they are robust.
Examples of that is

Steve Summit's maintainance of the FAQ for comp.lang.c
See http://c-faq.com/

Marshall Cline's maintainance of the FAQ for comp.lang.c++
See http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/

Both make sure any code snippets are compliant with the latest ISO C & C++
standards.
And generally if programmers adhere to "Best Practice", their code will be
robust.
Deviating usually means you (or your clients) will get burnt.
And if I move to some new langauge, some new technology, the first thing I
try to find out is what is considered "Best Practice" for that area and
adopt it.
It is the fastest way to get up to speed in some new area.

Meyers, Sutter, Dewhurst, Alexandrescu, Cline all write "Best Practice"
books for C++. All consider ISO C++ compliance as a prequisite.
Schildt, AFAIK, has never made an effort to make sure his offerings conform
to "Best Practice".
So that mean novice real programmer has been getting a bad deal from Schildt
for some time.

And I would gladly buy a Schildt book if it was any good, and he showed that
he cared about fixing errors.
And if I release a book and it is savaged, then I will take the medicine on
the chin and make sure any 2nd offering is better.
But I would hope to get it right first time.

Stephen Howe


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: How a delete a object from DOM ?
    ... And it takes a fool to introduce a project specific style convention ... programmers. ... serious javascript programmer will be familiar with it. ... What is common practice? ...
    (comp.lang.javascript)
  • Re: Replacing Delphi developers
    ... Good coding practice is one of those things that many people take on ... gained with age, not from sitting in lectures, nor from the choice of some ... attribute and must be learnt from other programmers, by hanging out on a ng, ...
    (comp.lang.pascal.delphi.misc)
  • Re: What will many cores mean to future Windows releases?
    ... Or if you don't like the view analogy one might think about an OPF an another sort of 'VM'--let the programmer write myObj.Save and an entire underlying layer is invoked. ... The programmers must concentrate on their human problem, ... In fact, these aren't VM anymore but, as you stated, JIT compilers. ... The gap between the best software engineering practice ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: Really hardcore question about PHP needed :)
    ... i believe though that the standard practice is to ... |> brackets to clearly show the body block rather than just leaving that to ... We're programmers, not women! ... everyone can format their code, it's a matter of knowing best practices. ...
    (comp.lang.php)
  • Re: Do header files really serve a useful purpose?
    ... Learning it completely is very hard. ... >there is a good deal of excellent software written in the language. ... The also seem to encourage programmers to avoid using namespaces. ...
    (comp.lang.cpp)