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

Bjarne Stroustrup

Other programming languages constitute a mountain of ideas and inspiration-but it has to be mined carefully to avoid featurism and inconsistencies.
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Carefully Feaaturism Ideas Inconsistences Promoted
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.
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Efficient Keys Safe Together
When done well, software is invisible.
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Done Invisible Software
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
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Arrogant Benefits Technology
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
However, when Java is promoted as the sole programming language, its flaws and limitations become serious.
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Java Language Serious
Anybody who comes to you and says he has a perfect language is either naive or a salesman.
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Language Perfect Salesman
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.
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Clue Helping Ideas
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.
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Important Language Simple Use
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.
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Effort Java May
Any verbose and tedious solution is error-prone because programmers get bored.
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Bored Errors Programmers
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.
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Class Depth Order
Creativity, engineering principles, and evolutionary change are needed to create a satisfactory large system.
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Creativity Engineering Evolutionary Satisfactory
C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off.
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Funny Humorous Witty
[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
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!
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Google Quality Thinking
For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous.
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Dangerous Language Program Think
I find languages that support just one programming paradigm constraining
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Language Programming Support
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.
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Initiative Matters People Practice Wasteful
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
Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.
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Design Forget Lost
Clearly, I reject the view that there is one way that is right for everyone and for every problem.
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Problem Views Way
The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel.
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Book Provoking Reading Though
Personally, I look forward to better tools for analyzing C++ source code.
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Analyzing Looks Tools
I would encourage nonproprietary standards for tools and libraries.
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Library Standard Tools
There are more useful systems developed in languages deemed awful than in languages praised for being beautiful – many more.
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Awful Beautiful Developed System
“Legacy code” often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling.
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Alternatives Code Legacy

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

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

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