Personally, I am a little frustrated by OpenCV's move to C++ interface. Yes, it looks like a high-level language by mimicking Matlab style. But at the end of the day, the implementation uses many advanced C++ features, and ignored one thing that C++ is really good at: abstracting to objects / object interactions.
Computer vision task is very different, from, for example, a game engine. From engineering perspective, computer vision tasks are very functional. You throw an image to it, get some semantic information out of it, and done. The only objects there are images, and it is boring (Really? You need a inheritance relationship between different type of images? Tell me what's the behavioral difference!). Thus, object-oriented style is not the best abstraction for this kind of task at all. However, C++ is all about object-oriented programming! (and it is really useful for game engines, where you actually have a lot different objects and interacting with each other).
(Then here is the question, how to support different types of image? From the people I talked with, it seems to me the general conscious is to use generated code no matter you use c or c++. Generated code can be type safe, and still very fast. Effectively, this is what template does for OpenCV and macro does for ccv, although, both approaches are not the best.)
Take the end result, it is easy to use OpenCV's new interface (if you are familiar with Matlab), but hard to hack in. OTOH, it does provide quite a lot algorithms for you to experiment with, but then, if you need to write something new (the end goal of experimentation after all), it is really not an easy undertaking.
ccv takes a different path. Don't experiment with it, use it in your application, trust the underlying implementation is the best-of-its-kind, and you will be happy.
> However, C++ is all about object-oriented programming!
That really depends on how you use the language. Looking at the code I normally see there's almost no inheritance, but lots of static polymorphism through templates. Data tends to be stored in structs, tuples and the default data structures (vectors, mostly), and a lot of use is made of the new lambdas and the functional bits of the STL.
I know that you can write Java in C++ (and that many people do), but it's not really the language's raison d'être.
One of the creators of Django once told me, "Flask is what Django would have been if we designed it in 2010 instead of 2006." Sometimes smaller is actually better.
There's a difference between software having features and having opinions. For example, Pylons (http://www.pylonsproject.org/) ships with a large feature set but doesn't feel like you're forced to use any of them, whereas Django ships with a larger feature set and doesn't give you much choice.
Naturally, there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.
I think, judging from his commit comments, the focus was on applications rather than completely covering all possible algorithms without an eye towards ease of usage and implementation.
