Bulldozer00's Blog

In Bjarne Stroustrup‘s keynote speech at “Going Native 2012“, he presented the standard C library qsort() function signature as an example of ghastly style that he’d wish programmers and (especially) educators would move away from:

Bjarne then presented an alternative style, which not only yields cleaner and less error prone code, but much faster performance to boot:

Bjarne blames educators, who want to stay rooted in the ancient dogma that “low level coding == optimal efficiency“, for sustaining the unnecessarily complex “void star” mindset that still pervades the C and C++ programming population.

Because they are taught the “void star” way of programming by teaching “experts“, and code of that ilk is ubiquitous throughout academia and the industry, newbie C and C++ programmers who don’t know any better strive to produce code of that “quality“. The innocent thinking behind the motivation is: “that’s the way most people write code, so it must be good and kool“.

I can relate to Mr. Stroustrup’s exasperation because it took perfect-me a long time to overcome the “void star” mental model of the world. It was so entrenched in my brain and oft practiced that I still unconsciously drift back into my old ways from time to time. It’s like being an alcoholic where constant self-vigilance and an empathic sponsor are required to keep the demons at bay. Bummer.