... so here we are, suddenly in the minority. What brought us here, after such a meteroric ascension to power a little over a decade ago? We were the party of responsibility (we "delete" what we "new"), of limited executable size (no VMs to carry around), of conservation of system resources (don't hog the CPU, be lean with memory, be as light on the wire as you can). We preached doing your own memory management, we stressed design patterns, we had all of the answers that the world needed to develop truly great software.

So what happened? We've lost our way. Garbage collection libraries, very high-level class libraries that added dozens of function calls to a typical call stack before it got to libc / libc++, cheap RAM, broadband, really inexpensive multi-gigabyte hard disks, super-fast CPUs ... we grew just as slow and bloated as that which were were rallying against, not to mention more fractured with every new platform we coded for ("OLE / [D]COM! No, DO! No way, CORBA!"). We came to change development, and development changed us. The Java programmers have taken over, with their garbage collectors, GUI toolkits, IDEs, RMI, XML-on-the-wire and resource-consuming VMs ... and we've lost our way.

Now is the time to step back, examine our ascension and declension, and re-affirm ourselves to the core principles we believe in. Just yesterday, I fixed a file seek / write bug in my code :-)

Regards,

John, winking

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