Ken Thompson on C++

“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.”

“I would try out the [C++] language [at AT&T] as it was being developed and make comments on it. It was part of the work atmosphere there. And you'd write something and then the next day it wouldn't work because the language changed. It was very unstable for a very long period of time. At some point, I said, no, no more. In an interview I said exactly that, that I didn't use it because it wouldn't stay still for two days in a row. When Stroustrup read the interview he came screaming into my room about how I was undermining him and what I said mattered and I said it was a bad language.”

“[C++] certainly has its good points. But by and large I think it's a bad language. It does a lot of things half well and it’s just a garbage heap of ideas that are mutually exclusive. Everybody I know, whether it’s personal or corporate, selects a subset and these subsets are different. So it’s not a good language to transport an algorithm—to say, "I wrote it; here, take it." It’s way too big, way too complex. And it’s obviously built by a committee. Stroustrup campaigned for years and years and years, way beyond any sort of technical contributions he made to the language, to get it adopted and used. And he sort of ran all the standards committees with a whip and a chair. And he said "no" to no one. He put every feature in that language that ever existed. It wasn't cleanly designed—it was just the union of everything that came along. And I think it suffered drastically from that.”