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

Bjarne Stroustrup

If you think it’s simple, then you have misunderstood the problem.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Misunderstood Simple Thinking
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
Always think about how a piece of code should be used: good interfaces are the essence of good code.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Clever Dirty Thinking
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
Any verbose and tedious solution is error-prone because programmers get bored.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Bored Errors Programmers
Proof by analogy is fraud.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Analogies Fraud Proof
Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Design Forget Lost
The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Book Provoking Reading Though
The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Important Learning Simplicity
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
Creativity, engineering principles, and evolutionary change are needed to create a satisfactory large system.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Creativity Engineering Evolutionary Satisfactory
Too many managers and executives try to reduce programming to a low-level assembly-line activity. That’s inefficient, wasteful, costly in the long run, and inhumane to programmers.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Insufficient Long Running Trying
“Legacy code” often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Alternatives Code Legacy
I would encourage nonproprietary standards for tools and libraries.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

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

Mathematics Science Years
There’s an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone.
BJARNE STROUSTRUP

Stories Technology Wish

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

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

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