“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.”

It is easy to study the rules of overloading and of templates without noticing that together they are one of the keys to elegant and efficient type-safe containers.

C++ is my favorite garbage collected language because it generates so little garbage

C++ is designed to allow you to express ideas, but if you don’t have ideas or don’t have any clue about how to express them, C++ doesn’t offer much help.

Most of the programmers in ten years will be us, and we won’t get much smarter.

This evolution may compromise Java’s claim of being simpler than C++, but my guess is that the effort will make Java a better language than it is today.

Java isn’t platform independent; it is a platform

I assume that a sufficiently skilled will be able to do anything not explicitly forbidden by the hardware.

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

I would encourage nonproprietary standards for tools and libraries.

Defining OO as based on the use of class hierarchies and virtual functions is also practical in that it provides some guidance as to where OO is likely to be successful.

I find languages that support just one programming paradigm constraining

Other programming languages constitute a mountain of ideas and inspiration-but it has to be mined carefully to avoid featurism and inconsistencies.

Our civilization depends critically on software, and we have a dangerously low degree of professionalism in the computer fields

Some software is actually pretty good, by any standard. Think of the Mars Rovers, Google, and the Human Genome Project. Now, that’s quality software!

When done well, software is invisible.

The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build.