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

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.

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.

For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous.

I like doing research that has an impact. If I went to a company to make what they call ‘real money,’ I’d be just trying to make a system work as fast as possible to meet the product and serice deadlines.

With the increasing importance of standards for system-level objects such as COM and CORBA, it is particularly important that the C++ bindings to those be clean, well documented, and simple to use.