David Abrahams wrote:
I agree with that, unless one replaces the "Avantgarde/research" with "for experts." I.e., I want Boost to remain a choice for C++ experts.
We never wanted to be the sole province of experts. We always wanted widespread usage. If you want to be a member of an exclusive "experts" club this is the wrong place to find it.
I do not want to be a member of an "experts" club, I want a set of tools that actually fit a highly experienced developer. It just might be that such a toolset would not fit the less experienced one. If Boost can fit the whole spectrum, great By the way, I think there indeed is a correlation between "make -k"/"bjam"-adaptable developers and those using the most complex portions of Boost.
Most of those "millions of C++ users" that Oliver is refering to are actually quite junior C developers who have been forced to use some C++ keywords and OOP in order to exploit MFC instead of raw Win32 programming.
Yes.
And those developers already have MFC and ATL, and would probably only use 'shared_ptr' from Boost.
That's a good start.
Agreed, and that is usually the way that I sneak Boost into the "mainstream" developer's vocabulary.
What I am saying is that it would not be unreasonable to expect the targeted developers to actually type 'bjam', and perhaps even set the proper environment variables.
It would be unreasonable for some of them. I've worked with quite advanced and competent developers who are only comfortable in an IDE.
But they sure would be able to change one or two environment variables and type 'bjam', right?
I do not think we have to flirt with the masses
Too late ;-)
- developers that would not use the facilities found in Boost anyway - in order to position it better for incorporation into future C++ standardizations.
Yes, we do. We need maximal adoption in order to be best positioned for standardization. Not just to get the libraries accepted, but also so they are really deserving of standardization.
The risk is that Boost will inevitably belong to those 50% of the C++ standard that is never touched by most developers, ever. None of the "C++ experts" I have interviewed for employment has heard of the keyword 'typename' or used template template parameters, or used 'virtual' base classes. That does not mean that I will stop preaching Boostness for all C++ developers I meet. Heck, I even try to promote Lambda and MPL, so you are probably right, Mr. Abrahams. Boost actually might help reunifying C++ again, instead of constituting two languages, one for MFC:ers (I have developed a lot of MFC apps myself, so do not take the label literally) and one for "experts", which it does today, IMEHO. /David Bergman