Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes

Anybody who comes to you and says he has a perfect language is either naïve or a salesman.

If you think it's simple, then you have misunderstood the problem.

[Corporate programming] is often done to the point where the individual is completely submerged in corporate "culture" with no outlet for unique talents and skills. Corporate practices can be directly hostile to individuals with exceptional skills and initiative in technical matters. I consider such management of technical people cruel and wasteful.

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off.

There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

Far too often, "software engineering" is neither engineering nor about software.

If you do anything useful it will haunt you forever after, and if you have a major success you get decades of hard manual labor — meaning you have to work on the manual.

Maybe "just one little global variable" isn't too unmanageable, but that style leads to code that is useless except to its original programmer.

I do not think that safety should be bought at the cost of complicating the expression of good solutions to real-life problems.

"Legacy code" is a term often used derogatorily to characterize code that is written in a language or style that (1) the speaker/writer consider outdated and/or (2) is competing with something sold/promoted by the speaker/writer. "Legacy code" often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling.

The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous.

I'm convinced that you could design a language about a tenth of the size of C++ (whichever way you measure size) providing roughly what C++ does.

One of the things I really like about programming languages is that it's the perfect excuse to stick your nose into any field. So if you're interested in high energy physics and the structure of the universe, being a programmer is one of the best ways to get in there. It's probably easier than becoming a theoretical physicist.

Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out.