More Stroustrup On Programming

Technology Review has a followup of their interview with Bjarne Stroustrup. This continues with C++ questions and programming styles rather than problems in programming. Some of the highlights are that Stroustrup does not think Aspect Oriented Programming will be picked up outside academia because of practical problems with overhauling the tool chain. He also talks about futures of programming. I am a little more optimistic about AOP and I think what has been missed out is functional programming.

Something that every programmer should take away from this is

The idea of programming as a semiskilled task, practiced by people with a few months’ training, is dangerous. We wouldn’t tolerate plumbers or accountants that poorly educated. We don’t have as an aim that architecture (of buildings) and engineering (of bridges and trains) should become more accessible to people with progressively less training.

I have seen a lot of programmers who want to skip a lot of parts of software development. They want to use code generators without having to know how to program, they want to build web GUIs using drag and drop without having to know the underlying HTML. Unfortunately they cannot disown the responsibility when something goes wrong there. Tools should be used but they tools can never replace knowledge, they can only automate tasks.