The back cover of C++: The Language raises questions not answered by front cover

Posted by paulmooreparks 4 days ago

Counter155Comment51OpenOriginal

Comments

Comment by seanhunter 4 days ago

It reminds me of an incident involving an old colleague of mine at some kind of graduate recruitment fair thing. He walked past a stand which was trying to hire engineers which had some code on the wall when the following exchange happened:

   Recruiter: Hey there! <indicates the code> Do you know what this is?
   Colleague: Err, <looks…thinks for a bit>… It *looks* like some sort of network protocol
   Recruiter: <smug> No, it’s *COMPUTER CODE*

Comment by fiedzia 4 days ago

I like to pause movies when some code is shown and see what it is. Apparently you can break into pentagon by knowing basic sql and high-level employees have alternate life writing tcp implementations and graphics libraries.

Comment by cout 4 days ago

Occasionally there are some real treats in those snippets. I remember being floored when Trinity exploited a real ssh v1 bug in Matrix Reloaded.

Comment by hilariously 3 days ago

My memory is probably faulty but didn't she use nmap too?

Comment by quuxplusone 3 days ago

Yep. (Discussed more than once on HN, which is why I know this link exists:)

https://nmap.org/movies/

Comment by cout 3 days ago

Yes.

Comment by WalterBright 3 days ago

The movie "Demon Seed" showed a DECsystem 10 command line. Hahaha.

Comment by sunrunner 4 days ago

I always liked the code Easter egg in Ex Machina. A scene with Caleb has a Python script visible on screen that, when run, prints:

  ISBN = 9780199226559
This is Murray Shanahan’s Embodiment and the inner life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds, quite relevant to the film.

Comment by TACD 4 days ago

There’s a Tumblr for that: https://www.tumblr.com/moviecode

Comment by fiedzia 3 days ago

Also Eddie Izzard shows how it really looks like: https://youtu.be/TKQzqwn-jIM?si=Ad_ZMhFr4As6H0lr

Comment by WalterBright 3 days ago

Well, at least movies no longer run the ka-chunka-ka-chunka ASR-33 teletype sounds when showing text on a screen.

Comment by ikari_pl 4 days ago

I felt like a movie hacker when doing literal

SELECT * FROM military_bases

On a public dataset :)

Comment by sunrunner 4 days ago

I paused the film to catch Lisbeth Salander, brilliant hacker and investigator, doing exactly this kind of complex query.

I guess the brilliant hacking was the bit you don’t see getting access to the super secure database in the first place?

Comment by sureglymop 4 days ago

Do we actually think you couldn't though? Probably unintentionally accurate.

Comment by fiedzia 4 days ago

I guess there might be Bobby 'insert into EMPLOYEES...' tables somewhere.

Comment by ramon156 4 days ago

Render your local file tree, win a free pentagon entry

Comment by thunderbong 3 days ago

Also hackers in movies never use a mouse!

Comment by globnomulous 3 days ago

Alng the same lines: movies and tv shows have taught me that there are no door knobs in the future.

Comment by amiga386 3 days ago

I beg to differ, here's Scotty using one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkqiDu1BQXY

Comment by Shorel 3 days ago

He's a miraculous worker!

Comment by bad_username 4 days ago

I wish <smug></smug> was a real HTML tag

Comment by kstrauser 4 days ago

It's a semantic div tag, and it's spelled "<actually>".

Comment by sscaryterry 4 days ago

This is tongue in cheek, but those who can't do, teach, and those who can teach, recruit.

Comment by rererereferred 2 days ago

Once a recruiter asked me if I knew react, after answering yes they asked me if I knew javascript.

Comment by 20k 4 days ago

Its crazy to me how little effort publishers put into the basic parts of their job sometimes. Its even funnier that raymond chen of all people is the one calling this out

Comment by netsharc 2 days ago

Also crazy to me: how some people can't bother to capitalize names or use punctuation.

Considering the book's title is almost identical to Bjarne Stroustrup's book, it smells like an attempt to profit by confusing buyers.

Comment by Bolwin 4 days ago

Also is this an official Microsoft dev blog?

Probably not a good look back at publishing hq

Comment by mcherm 4 days ago

If you don't want to be called out for putting zero effort into the books that you publish, you probably shouldn't put zero effort into the books you publish!

Comment by ryandrake 3 days ago

Also, if you want to keep your job designing the book covers!

Effort-free stock image on the front cover, generic copy-paste description on the back cover. Hard to tell if whoever was responsible for the cover design is worried about his job being replaced with AI, because if he is, he has an odd way of showing it.

Comment by windward 4 days ago

It is, and it's a famous and popular blog too. Lots of older submissions have been highly upvoted here.

Comment by defrost 4 days ago

On the matter of book back text, The Profit by Kehlog Albran has a rear blurb that likens the style of the author to that of a man with a much larger brain.

Comment by taneq 4 days ago

This post discusses the topic and makes several key observations.

Comment by _kst_ 4 days ago

I wonder if the book itself is actually any good.

My understanding is that authors often have little or not control over the covers chosen by their publishers.

It's at least possible that the book itself is excellent, but I'm not going to spend $90+ on a hardcover copy to find out.

Comment by 3 days ago

Comment by kzrdude 3 days ago

It has a bad reputation but judging books by their cover is increasingly useful.

Comment by diegolas 3 days ago

i judge almost everything i consume by their cover/packaging

Comment by koolala 4 days ago

At least the JavaScript image is excusable since most implementations are made in C++.

Comment by pjmlp 4 days ago

And some of us expect that candidates have at least read the C++ addons documentation chapter.

Comment by epolanski 3 days ago

Which kind of candidates, for which kind of position?

I have not seen much, if any, JavaScript developers touching C++ modules much beyond library authors needing bindings for SQLite, etc.

Comment by pjmlp 3 days ago

Backend development with node.

Knowing how to write native modules is one blog post less on "We rewrote X in Y" on HN frontage.

You might argue why not using something else in first place, well in consulting quite often we have tl adapt to the customer IT stack.

Concrete example deploying into Vercel Functions, and there is a small performance boost required.

Nowadays I would rather push for Go or Rust runtime, but until this year they weren't officially supported, as they were community runtime builds.

In any case, I expect someone doing backend development to actually understand performance, and how to improve it.

Comment by epolanski 3 days ago

This sounds reasonable if your use case is squeezing more horsepower out of Node applications and the JavaScript part has already been pushed to its limits.

As someone who's done lots of backend development _in_ node though, I'm not really proficient in C++ enough nor I ever had teams able to maintain such modules.

I'm not criticizing your approach, mind you, it's absolutely understandable, just uncommon for someone to be really proficient at both languages.

Comment by 9o1d 3 days ago

Plot twist: the publisher just looked into the future. I’m currently building an EBNF parser for my project, C³ (C cubed), which allows you to define arbitrary grammar at the very beginning of a file to seamlessly mix strings and syntax from Python, JS, or any custom DSL.

While C++ was just a simple iteration, C³ aims to be a paradigm shift. If you see JavaScript DOM manipulation code on a C++ book cover, it’s not a stock photo blunder anymore — it’s just a valid source file after a custom EBNF header. The project is currently in private development, but I'm considering launching it as an online service. Stay tuned!

https://gitlab.com/9o1d/C3v3

Comment by vintagedave 3 days ago

The repo readme doesn't mention anything like that. It looks an ambitious project. I think the AI-style tone in the readme, or things like 'paradigm shift' and that it would be an online service (for a language? huh?) may be contributing to the downvotes you're getting.

Comment by 9o1d 3 days ago

[flagged]

Comment by pvillano 3 days ago

The cover does not matter for a textbook.

Most textbooks sold are bought by students because they were required for a course. Students are not choosing a textbook by cover because they're not choosing a textbook at all. Professors choosing which textbook to assign are doing so based on the content, because that's what they'll be teaching. Professors also get a lot of free sample copies, and are probably choosing between those instead of purchasing their own set of candidates based on the cover.

Comment by uwagar 4 days ago

i so wanted it to be the cover of stroustrup book :P

fwiw, i stopped keepin up with c++ in 2003. saved my sanity!

Comment by tialaramex 3 days ago

Stroustrup's book is named "The C++ Programming Language" in imitation of the (much superior) "The C Programming Language" aka K&R.

This book's title is a little different.

Comment by amiga386 3 days ago

We have always had slop.

There have always been people trying to push low-effort, low-value things as high-value things by copying the superficial aspects of high-value things. People literally do "judge a book by its cover", and can be tricked into buying it even when the contents are worthless.

People in a bookshop don't want to have to read entire chapters of each book they're thinking of buying in order to be sure they're all legitimate books of value. They want the bookseller to have done that for them, and know every book in the shop had at least some effort put into it.

The internet is not a bookshop. An enshittified platform like Amazon is not a bookshop. If a slopmaker can pay a platform to tout absolute slop, you now can't trust the platform. It's all so tiresome.

It's now just easier to perform that dishonesty and waste even more people's time than ever before.

Comment by block_dagger 4 days ago

A clear case of human slop.

Comment by hmry 4 days ago

This 9 year old publisher still slops the old-fashioned way

Comment by haeseong 4 days ago

[flagged]

Comment by gruntled-worker 4 days ago

auto get_xyz_position() -> std::unordered_map<std::string, double *> { ... }

Comment by hmry 4 days ago

You'll need to elaborate

Comment by klez 4 days ago

It's probably the C++ version of the tired EnterpriseBuilderPatternWhateverFactory jokes about java verbosity.