Live from C++ Connections

I thought I'd try my hand at this live blogging thing to see first hand what all the kids are talking about.  :)  I'm currently in Matt Austern's session on TR1, where he's discussing the proposed additions to the standard C++ library.  Matt is delivering a well organized presentation on TR1's greatest hits, including smart pointers, function binders, function wrappers, regular expressions, random number generators, tuples, and hash tables (unfortunately referred to as "unordered associative containers" -- yes, seriously).

Regular expressions are one one of my favorite things.  Not just because they're way-useful (and they are) but also because I always get a comic relief charge out of their "write-only" nature.  You know how your own code can become difficult to comprehend after a year?  I have trouble decoding my regular expressions about 10 minutes after writing them.  I'd rather try to decipher ancient aramaic than a complicated regex.

I also enjoyed Bjarne Stroustrup's C++ keynote this morning, where he spoke about the philosophy behind the language.  Clearly the multi-platform, multi-paradigm,  zero-cost aspects of the language are among the most important to him.

I tend to also heavily value the importance of developer productivity, which is something I feel the industry needs to be much better about, especially with a complex language like C++.  Things like TR1 and Boost are really cool, but there is going to be a challenge in helping developers make the right coding decisions and in making the code easy to debug and maintain.