Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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
"Legacy code" often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling.

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

Bjarne Stroustrup
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

Bjarne Stroustrup
It is often claimed that the structure of a system reflects the structure of the organization that created it.

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

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

Bjarne Stroustrup
The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer

Bjarne Stroustrup
Any verbose and tedious solution is error-prone because programmers get bored.

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

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

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
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
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
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
The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build.

Bjarne Stroustrup
"How to test?" is a question that cannot be answered in general. "When to test?" however, does have a general answer: as early and as often as possible.

Bjarne Stroustrup
One of the things I really like about programming languages is that it's the perfect excuse to stick your nose into any field. So if you're interested in high energy physics and the structure of the universe, being a programmer is one of the best ways to get in there. It's probably easier than becoming a theoretical physicist

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

Bjarne Stroustrup