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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

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
Creativity, engineering principles, and evolutionary change are needed to create a satisfactory large system.
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Creativity Engineering Evolutionary Satisfactory
Nobody should call themselves a professional if they only knew one language.
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Language Person Professional Should
When done well, software is invisible.
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Done Invisible Software
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.
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Insufficient Long Running Trying
Any verbose and tedious solution is error-prone because programmers get bored.
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Bored Errors Programmers
Personally, I look forward to better tools for analyzing C++ source code.
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Analyzing Looks Tools
If you think it’s simple, then you have misunderstood the problem.
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Misunderstood Simple Thinking
“Legacy code” often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling.
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Alternatives Code Legacy
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
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
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
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.
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Believe Discussing People Simple
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
There is no one “root of all evil” in software development. Design is hard in many ways.
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Creativity Engineering Simple
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
You can hide all kinds of clever and dirty code behind a good interface if you really need such code.
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Code Good Interface Need Really
The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems and solutions we can imagine is very close.
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Connections Errors Thinking
Proof by analogy is fraud.
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Analogies Fraud Proof
C++ is my favorite garbage collected language because it generates so little garbage
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Garbage Language Littles
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
The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel.
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Book Provoking Reading Though
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
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
The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build.
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Important Learning Simplicity
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.
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Cad Support Tools
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

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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