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Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes

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Here is a collection of quotes from my writings, talks, and interviews. My main motivation for posting this is to confirm genuine quotes so as to help people distinguish them from made up ones, misquote, and poor translations. Also, in some cases, I provide some context for a quote. There are undoubtedly more genuine quotes "out there" but I can only confirm the ones I know of. "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off". Yes, I said something like that (in 1986 or so). What people tend to miss, is that what I said there about C++ is to a varying extent true for all powerful languages. As you protect people from simple dangers, they get themselves into new and less obvious problems. Someone who avoids the simple problems may simply be heading for a not-so-simple one. One problem with very supporting and protective environments is that the hard problems may be discovered too late or be too hard to remedy once discover

Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes home | C++ | FAQ | technical FAQ | publications | WG21 papers | TC++PL | Tour++ | Programming | D&E | bio | interviews | videos | quotes | applications | guidelines | compilers Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes Modified December 6, 2025. Here is a collection of quotes from my writings, talks, and interviews. My main motivation for posting this is to confirm genuine quotes so as to help people distinguish them from made up ones, misquote, and poor translations. Also, in some cases, I provide some context for a quote. There are undoubtedly more genuine quotes "out there" but I ca

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