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

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260605-01/?p=112391

by paulmooreparks • 2 months ago

156 51 2 months ago

devblogs.microsoft.com

20k• 2 months 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

defrost• 2 months 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.

Bolwin• 2 months ago

Also is this an official Microsoft dev blog?

Probably not a good look back at publishing hq

windward• 2 months ago

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

mcherm• 2 months 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!

netsharc• 2 months 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.

gruntled-worker• 2 months ago

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

hmry2• 2 months ago

You'll need to elaborate

klez• 2 months ago

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

seanhunter• 2 months 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*

bad_username• 2 months ago

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

kstrauser• 2 months ago

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

sscaryterry• 2 months ago

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

fiedzia3• 2 months 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.

TACD• 2 months ago

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

ramon156• 2 months ago

Render your local file tree, win a free pentagon entry

sureglymop• 2 months ago

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

ikari_pl• 2 months ago

I felt like a movie hacker when doing literal

SELECT * FROM military_bases

On a public dataset :)

cout2• 2 months 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.

sunrunner2• 2 months 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.

thunderbong• 2 months ago

Also hackers in movies never use a mouse!

WalterBright2• 2 months ago

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

rererereferred• 1 month ago

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

block_dagger• 2 months ago

A clear case of human slop.

hmry2• 2 months ago

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

koolala• 2 months ago

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

pjmlp2• 2 months ago

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

epolanski2• 2 months 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.

taneq• 2 months ago

This post discusses the topic and makes several key observations.

_kst_• 2 months 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.

uwagar• 2 months 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!

tialaramex• 2 months 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.

9o1d• 2 months 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

vintagedave• 2 months 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.

amiga3862• 2 months 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.

pvillano• 2 months 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.

kzrdude• 2 months ago

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

diegolas• 2 months ago

i judge almost everything i consume by their cover/packaging

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

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