C++

“The complexity of C++ (even more complexity has been added in the new C++), and the resulting impact on productivity, is no longer justified. All the hoops that the C++ programmer had to jump through in order to use a C-compatible language make no sense anymore -- they're just a waste of time and effort. Now, Go makes much more sense for the class of problems that C++ was originally intended to solve.”

“Writing in C or C++ is like running a chain saw with all the safety guards removed.”

“Actually I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.”

“And C++ programming languages, we own those, have licensed them out multiple times, obviously. We have a lot of royalties coming to us from C++.”

“I believe C++ instills fear in programmers, fear that the interaction of some details causes unpredictable results. Its unmanageable complexity has spawned more fear-preventing tools than any other language, but the solution should have been to create and use a language that does not overload the whole goddamn human brain with irrelevant details.”

“In C++, reinvention is its own reward.”

“C++ is a language strongly optimized for liars and people who go by guesswork and ignorance.”

“In 30 years Lisp will likely be ahead of C++/Java (but behind something else)”

“C gives the programmer what the programmer wants; few restrictions, few complaints... C++ maintains the original spirit of C, that the programmer not the language is in charge.”

“You can use C++ if you want with GNOME, but we don't assume that you're going to write C++. It's to a large extent based on Scheme, which is a dialect of LISP. LISP being the most powerful and cleanest of languages, that's the language that's the GNU project always prefers.”

“C++ is a badly designed and ugly language. It would be a shame to use it in Emacs.”

“And you're right: we [the Java designers] were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?”

“Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out.”

“In C++ it's harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do, you blow off your whole leg.”

“The major cause of complaints is C++ undoubted success. As someone remarked: There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses.”

“C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog.”

“When the three of us [Thompson, Rob Pike, and Robert Griesemer] got started, it was pure research. The three of us got together and decided that we hated C++. [laughter] … [Returning to Go,] we started off with the idea that all three of us had to be talked into every feature in the language, so there was no extraneous garbage put into the language for any reason.”

“C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.”

“In other words, the only way to do good, efficient, and system-level and portable C++ ends up to limit yourself to all the things that are basically available in C. And limiting your project to C means that people don't screw that up, and also means that you get a lot of programmers that do actually understand low-level issues and don't screw things up with any idiotic "object model" crap.”

“If you want a fancier language, C++ is absolutely the worst one to choose. If you want real high-level, pick one that has true high-level features like garbage collection or a good system integration, rather than something that lacks both the sparseness and straightforwardness of C, and doesn't even have the high-level bindings to important concepts.”

“C++ is in that inconvenient spot where it doesn't help make things simple enough to be truly usable for prototyping or simple GUI programming, and yet isn't the lean system programming language that C is that actively encourages you to use simple and direct constructs.”

“A system composed of 100,000 lines of C++ is not be sneezed at, but we don't have that much trouble developing 100,000 lines of COBOL today. The real test of OOP will come when systems of 1 to 10 million lines of code are developed.”