[jacquesm]

> I don't find it at all insightful or humorous.

Humor isn't an absolute. I find it funny because if Stroustrup had tried he probably couldn't have made a language with more footguns, there are so many things in there that require a lot of discipline not to use (or overuse). At the same time it was a supremely useful language that allowed for much better abstraction than C ever did but it definitely came with a price.

> (I hope you don't think it's genuine)

Wait, what, that wasn't real???

[emmelaich]

Oh absolutely not an absolute, but there are qualities that make or break good humour.

On the footgun side, I dunno. It probably widened and/or deepened. If you read e.g. Effective C++ and turned on all warnings you were much better off than in plain C. OTOH of course it's a more complex language.

A lot of the early criticism of C++ was directed at the OO features, which have fallen well out of favour.

[froh]

> not real?

real genuine Eric S Raymond humor, yes.

[jacquesm]

I've been a C++ user since 'cfront' and he simply has a point. If Stroustrup had been a little bit more disciplined about what features to add and which to leave out C++ would have been much more manageable. I'm not really afraid of many things but legacy C++ codebases I try very hard to stay away from. With some luck the original author(s) went overboard with all of the stuff that's available and never got around to refactoring any of it.

[emmelaich]

C compatibility is both the best and worst thing about C++