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

Bjarne Stroustrup

There is no one “root of all evil” in software development. Design is hard in many ways.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Creativity Engineering Simple
Certainly not every good program is object-oriented, and not every object-oriented program is good.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Good Objects Program Very
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.
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Class Function Hirerachies Successful Use
Always think about how a piece of code should be used: good interfaces are the essence of good code.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Clever Dirty Thinking
To many managers, getting rid of the arrogant, undisciplined, over-paid, technology-obsessed, improperly-dressed etc. programmers would appear to be a significant added benefit
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Arrogant Benefits Technology
First, I’d like to see the basic tools such as compilers, debuggers, profilers, database interfaces, GUI builders, CAD tools, and so forth fully support the ISO standard.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Cad Support Tools
Creativity, engineering principles, and evolutionary change are needed to create a satisfactory large system.
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Creativity Engineering Evolutionary Satisfactory
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.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Company Impact Possible Real Trying
There are more useful systems developed in languages deemed awful than in languages praised for being beautiful – many more.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Awful Beautiful Developed System
The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel.
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Book Provoking Reading Though
Most of the programmers in ten years will be us, and we won’t get much smarter.
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Mathematics Science Years
My impression was and is that many programming languages and tools represent solutions looking for problems, and I was determined that my work should not fall into that category.
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Fall Inspiration Real
C++ is my favorite garbage collected language because it generates so little garbage
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Garbage Language Littles
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.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Initiative Matters People Practice Wasteful
You can hide all kinds of clever and dirty code behind a good interface if you really need such code.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Code Good Interface Need Really
Nobody should call themselves a professional if they only knew one language.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Language Person Professional Should
Destructors for virtual base classes are executed in the reverse order of their appearance in a depth-first left-to-right traversal of the directed acyclic graph of base classes.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Class Depth Order
[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.
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Outlet Practice Skills Unique
Other programming languages constitute a mountain of ideas and inspiration-but it has to be mined carefully to avoid featurism and inconsistencies.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Carefully Feaaturism Ideas Inconsistences Promoted
For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Dangerous Language Program Think
Java isn’t platform independent; it is a platform
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Independent Java Platforms
The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems and solutions we can imagine is very close.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Connections Errors Thinking
People who passionately want to believe that the world is basically simple react to this with a fury that goes beyond what I consider appropriate for discussing a programming language.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Believe Discussing People Simple
An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only.
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Able Organization Treat
When done well, software is invisible.
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Done Invisible Software
I find languages that support just one programming paradigm constraining
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Language Programming Support
The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Important Learning Simplicity

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

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

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