The Invention of C++

Even for people who are humor-deficient, there's at least one dead giveaway:

"Whoever heard of memory leaks in a 'C' program?"

I remember I was amazed that IEEE Computer did give an interview with Stroustrup shortly after this hoax interview was circulated on the net. The real interview was not as funny as the hoax one but nevertheless was interesting.

http://www.research.att.com/~bs/ieee_interview.html

The sad thing is how many people get supper upset when somebody posts this somewhere, as if it was such an incredibly offensive joke, and as if you were spreading some really evil lies.

If somebody does take this interview seriously, it says more about them and about C++ than about the nature of the interview or whoever posted it.

And just because something is a hoax (and a rather obvious one at that) doesn't mean that it can't be filled with deep truths.

Cfront? I'd completely forgotten about using that. Here's Stroustrup's own history of C++:

http://www.research.att.com/~bs/hopl2.pdf

Twenty years ago, you'd get flamed to a crisp for that 'preprocessor' slip ...

[Amplification for those not watching back then: it was an important theological^Wtechnical point that 'cfront' (C++ -> C) was not just a simple macro expander like the C preprocessor.]

That sounds like I was bashing it too much...don't get me wrong, I respect C++...its obviously very powerful and popular. But the fake interview was spot on in some points. There's just way too damn much stuff in it for one language, and on many projects, some of its features are used when they were completely unnecessary, only adding complexity and tangled mess. It takes a lot of time and effort to master all of its features, and in many cases is bad for productivity. Also, it is a nightmare reading through a large codebase, unless the project is very well designed and heavily commented.