Question

I ran into this supposed interview of Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of C++.

http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/Invention_of_Cplusplus.shtml

Stroustrup: Well, it’s been long enough, now, and I believe most people have figured out for themselves that C++ is a waste of time but, I must say, it’s taken them a lot longer than I thought it would…

Interviewer: Yes, but C++ is basically a sound language.

Stroustrup: You really believe that, don’t you? Have you ever sat down and worked on a C++ project? Here’s what happens: First, I’ve put in enough pitfalls to make sure that only the most trivial projects will work first time. Take operator overloading. At the end of the project, almost every module has it, usually, because guys feel they really should do it, as it was in their training course. The same operator then means something totally different in every module. Try pulling that lot together, when you have a hundred or so modules. And as for data hiding, God, I sometimes can’t help laughing when I hear about the problems companies have making their modules talk to each other.

Is this a hoax? Do any of these points seem true for any of the veteran C++ programmers out there?

Answer 1

You just have to check the Stroustrup’s website (the FAQ part) to find that it’s wrong – a well known hoax as Judah Himango already pointed :

Did you really give an interview to IEEE?

in which you confessed that C++ was deliberately created as an awful language for writing unmaintainable code to increase programmers’ salaries? Of course not. Read the real IEEE interview.