Replies

“Why didn’t Sun Microsystems get sued for plagiarizing C++?”

I’m not interested in the plagiarizing issue but just wasn’t aware of multiple flavors of C++.

Are there flavors that don’t adhere exactly to the ISO C++ specification? I use C++ in the MBED world.

C/C++ were open standards. Various vendors independently built compilers and other tools that conformed (more or less) to that standard.

Each vendor introduced C/C++ tools with their own idiosyncrasies/extensions.

Microsoft obtained a license to make a Java/JVM from Sun.
Sun sued Microsoft for violating their Java license alleging MS extensions were in violation of the license by enabling/promoting propriety Java source code among other thing.

Microsoft and Sun settled in 2002 with MS agreeing to pay some money to Sun.

SunOS -> Solaris transition hurt Sun as well as the rise of Linux and Windows servers — namely IIS and SQLServer.

There have been more C, C+, and C++ compilers in my lifetime than there have been head football coaches at Auburn. Some of them were fairly similar. For example, in the 90's when I was a computer science student with dial-up internet, I could usually do my Unix C++ homework at home on a DOS machine with a Borland C++ compiler (to keep from working across the slow hypertext terminal to one of the school's Unix machines). By the time I FTP'd my source code to the Unix box there was usually very little I had to change to make it compile with the Unix command-line compiler as well as it did on my DOS PC with the Borland C++ compiler. Of course, that's without getting into hardware or OS specific code that of course isn't cross-platform compatible.

About Java, IMHO one problem early on (late 90's early 00's) is it ran very slow in the Java API Sun made for Windows. So any apps made for the office (read: almost everybody running on Windows) meant the app ran slowly. Plus, Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE (Integrated Development Environment, the app software developers use to write code) was hands down the best app to make development easier regardless of the language. IMHO, Java as a language was a really good object-oriented language to make life easier than C++. But that benefit of Java didn't outweigh the two main problems with Java (development tools for Java couldn't compete with MS Visual Studio, and the finished project apps were slow on Windows machines).

There’s all kind of flavors of c++ and the STL depending on the age of the compiler. I’m retired now and I really don’t keep that up to date. I still code some utilities in C++, but I primarily program in MQL4, which is a loosely encapsulated, C++ derived language used for trading securities. It just reeks of C++ under its hood and I have no idea why native C++ wasn’t used for MetaTrader which runs the MQL4 code.

I also don’t care about plagiarism when it comes to programming languages. Us old guys had to deal with all sorts of language variants most of our lives that you quickly realize there are a commonalities among ever language that you can not get rid because it’s directly tied to logic that all languages need to solve problems, and every language has its unique syntactical features depending on underlying programming models.