Bjarne Stroustrup
Bjarne Stroustrup
Bjarne Stroustrupis a Danish computer scientist, most notable for the creation and development of the widely used C++ programming language. He is a visiting professor at Columbia University, and works at Morgan Stanley as a Managing Director in New York...
NationalityDanish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth30 December 1950
CountryDenmark
design forget programming
Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.
real fall inspiration
My impression was and is that many programming languages and tools represent solutions looking for problems, and I was determined that my work should not fall into that category. Thus, I follow the literature on programming languages and the debates about programming languages primarily looking for ideas for solutions to problems my colleagues and I have encountered in real applications. Other programming languages constitute a mountain of ideas and inspiration-but it has to be mined carefully to avoid featurism and inconsistencies.
unique practice skills
[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.
simple important use
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.
analogies proof fraud
Proof by analogy is fraud.
clever dirty thinking
Always think about how a piece of code should be used: good interfaces are the essence of good code. You can hide all kinds of clever and dirty code behind a good interface if you really need such code.
beautiful being-beautiful awful
There are more useful systems developed in languages deemed awful than in languages praised for being beautiful--many more.
science years mathematics
Most of the programmers in ten years will be us, and we won't get much smarter.
thinking errors connections
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.
library wheels librarian
The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel.
keys together safe
It is easy to study the rules of overloading and of templates without noticing that together they are one of the keys to elegant and efficient type-safe containers
fundamentals development way
The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer
real thinking expression
I do not think that safety should be bought at the cost of complicating the expression of good solutions to real-life problems.
legacy alternatives code
Legacy code" often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling.