> If Bjarne had been able to keep C++ his own creation ... C++ might have avoided becoming the over-designed language its become.
My impression is that this is wrong - the language owes essentially everything that it is (including the over-design) to Bjarne. I wrote my first C++ program in 1992 (or perhaps even earlier? I can't find copies of anything I wrote in C++ earlier than 1992), and I've been following the evolution and standardization.
Bjarne is definitely the person that started the "Oh, it's useful! Let's add it to the language incoherently introducing redundancy, duplication, and corners, and we'll sort it out later" mess that is C++.
I campaigned (unsuccessfully) in 1993 with my employer at the time to switch from C to C++ because I saw the benefits. Back then, C++ was already a mess in the making, but it was still small and elegant, and if you stayed within the subset supported by Turbo C++, g++ and Cfront, life was good.
Since 2005 or so, I've been campaigning against C++ and for C (or Python if performance is not critical). That was after I was brought in to fix a C++ monstrosity of a project (and not the first project like that), and realized that the problem actually IS with the language and culture.
My impression is that this is wrong - the language owes essentially everything that it is (including the over-design) to Bjarne. I wrote my first C++ program in 1992 (or perhaps even earlier? I can't find copies of anything I wrote in C++ earlier than 1992), and I've been following the evolution and standardization.
Bjarne is definitely the person that started the "Oh, it's useful! Let's add it to the language incoherently introducing redundancy, duplication, and corners, and we'll sort it out later" mess that is C++.
I campaigned (unsuccessfully) in 1993 with my employer at the time to switch from C to C++ because I saw the benefits. Back then, C++ was already a mess in the making, but it was still small and elegant, and if you stayed within the subset supported by Turbo C++, g++ and Cfront, life was good.
Since 2005 or so, I've been campaigning against C++ and for C (or Python if performance is not critical). That was after I was brought in to fix a C++ monstrosity of a project (and not the first project like that), and realized that the problem actually IS with the language and culture.