Top 35 Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The first law of computer science: Every problem is solved by yet another indirection.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

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2. “If you think it’s simple, then you have misunderstood the problem.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

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3. “The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

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4. “Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

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5. “When done well, software is invisible.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

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6. “A program that has not been tested does not work.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

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7. “The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

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8. “Proof by analogy is fraud.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

9. “Nobody should call themselves a professional if they only knew one language.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

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10. “Our civilization depends critically on software, and we have a dangerously low degree of professionalism in the computer fields.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

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11. “Java isn’t platform independent; it is a platform.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

12. “The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

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13. “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

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14. “Certainly not every good program is object-oriented, and not every object-oriented program is good.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

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15. “It is my firm belief that all successful languages are grown and not merely designed from first principles.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

16. “Anybody who comes to you and says he has a perfect language is either naive or a salesman.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

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17. “Any verbose and tedious solution is error-prone because programmers get bored.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

18. “Always think about how a piece of code should be used: good interfaces are the essence of good code. You can hide all kinds of clever and dirty code behind a good interface if you really need such code.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

19. “Most of the programmers in ten years will be us, and we won’t get much smarter.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

20. “However, when Java is promoted as the sole programming language, its flaws and limitations become serious.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

21. “An organization that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

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22. “It’s easy to win forgiveness for being wrong; being right is what gets you into real trouble.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

23. “Clearly, I reject the view that there is one way that is right for everyone and for every problem.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

24. “Defining OO as based on the use of class hierarchies and virtual functions is also practical in that it provides some guidance as to where OO is likely to be successful.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

25. “There’s an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

26. “Destructors for virtual base classes are executed in the reverse order of their appearance in a depth-first left-to-right traversal of the directed acyclic graph of base classes.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

27. “Some software is actually pretty good, by any standard. Think of the Mars Rovers, Google, and the Human Genome Project. Now, that’s quality software!”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

28. “It is easy to study the rules of overloading and of templates without noticing that together they are one of the keys to elegant and efficient type-safe containers.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

29. “Too many managers and executives try to reduce programming to a low-level assembly-line activity. That’s inefficient, wasteful, costly in the long run, and inhumane to programmers.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

30. “I like doing research that has an impact. If I went to a company to make what they call ‘real money,’ I’d be just trying to make a system work as fast as possible to meet the product and serice deadlines.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

31. “I would encourage nonproprietary standards for tools and libraries.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

32. “To many managers, getting rid of the arrogant, undisciplined, over-paid, technology-obsessed, improperly-dressed etc. programmers would appear to be a significant added benefit.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

33. “I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

34. “I do not think that safety should be bought at the cost of complicating the expression of good solutions to real-life problems.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

35. “I find languages that support just one programming paradigm constraining.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

36. “People who passionately want to believe that the world is basically simple react to this with a fury that goes beyond what I consider appropriate for discussing a programming language.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

37. “There are more useful systems developed in languages deemed awful than in languages praised for being beautiful – many more.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

38. “I assume that a sufficiently skilled will be able to do anything not explicitly forbidden by the hardware.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

39. “You must run before you can walk!”

— Bjarne Stroustrup