This is the old joke interview with Stroustrup where he admits C++ was only invented as a plot to increase programmer salaries by making programming more difficult than it had to be.
It should be pointed out that Stroustrup never gave this interview, and that it is a parody.
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.
Reading comments first would have spoiled this wonderful practical joke.
Fortunately I read it some time ago uninitiated. Sure I was lured into seriousness for a while. Then this-can't-be-true of course set in.
I wouldn't want to have missed that experience. As any practical joke, it makes one think about the capability of ones skepticism. A capability worth keeping in good shape.
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.
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.]
I knew it was a joke, but the funny thing is that most of it is true...c++ IS a jumbled mess, IMO. Sure, it made OOP popular, which paved the way for newer languages to implement it more cleanly, and make it easier to use/think about. C++ is good for generics, and native performance/compilers, but for some reason i've just always used plain old C for performance/system stuff, and another HLL like C# for OOP. I guess java is cool too, if you're on that side of the fence, but I think its a jumbled mess as well...but that's another story :-)
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.
This is the old joke interview with Stroustrup where he admits C++ was only invented as a plot to increase programmer salaries by making programming more difficult than it had to be.
It should be pointed out that Stroustrup never gave this interview, and that it is a parody.