Bjarne Stroustrup

1950– · Danish computer scientist, creator of C++ (born 1950)

Topics: programming, software design, software engineering, simplicity

• Far too often, "software engineering" is neither engineering nor about software.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• Clearly, I reject the view that there is one way that is right for everyone and for every problem

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• If you think it's simple, then you have misunderstood the problem.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we don't.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• 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

• The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• There are more useful systems developed in languages deemed awful than in languages praised for being beautiful — many more.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• I do not think that safety should be bought at the cost of complicating the expression of good solutions to real-life problems.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• If you do anything useful it will haunt you forever after, and if you have a major success you get decades of hard manual labor — meaning you have to work on the manual.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• If someone claims to have the perfect programming language, he is either a fool or a salesman or both.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• A program that has not been tested does not work.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• When done well, software is invisible.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• Maybe "just one little global variable" isn't too unmanageable, but that style leads to code that is useless except to its original programmer.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• I'm convinced that you could design a language about a tenth of the size of C++ (whichever way you measure size) providing roughly what C++ does.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• Proof by analogy is fraud.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup