Kevin Lynch wrote:
Deane Yang wrote:
I unfortunately have seen this opposition too, although not on the boost list. I've mostly encountered it from my colleagues who are physicists first, and use code as a tool, but couldn't care less about actually learning current idioms.
....
Make no mistake ... these are very, very smart people saying these things. But like most of us, they just can't or won't be bothered to invest energy in keeping up with current trends in areas outside their fields of expertise.
As some recent postings to this list have indicated, it is probably true that MOST C++ programmers, and not just the physicists, avoid templates and the idioms used and promoted by boost. On the other hand, the boost libraries have never, as far as I can tell, compromised on interfaces to accommodate programmers who don't like templates or modern C++ idioms. Why should the constants library be any different? Why should boost give physicists special consideration that most C++ programmers do not get?
That all said, I don't put much weight on the opinions of practitioners who fail to keep current or to understand why things are the way they are. Boost should "do the right thing". The users who complain will follow along after a time, because they'll have no choice ... their tools will change out from under them, and their graduate students will roll their eyes and force them to adapt to the modern idioms. We shouldn't be held back by the whiners ... if we did, the projects I work on would still be writing all our data acquisition and analysis code in Fortran IV :-)
Amen!