Designed by Bjarne Stroustrup of AT&T Bell Labs as a successor
to C. Now one of the languages of
choice, although many hackers still grumble that it is the
successor to either Algol 68 or Ada (depending on generation), and a prime
example of second-system effect. Almost anything
that can be done in any language can be done in C++, but it requires a
language lawyer to know what is and what is not
legal — the design is almost too large to hold
in even hackers' heads. Much of the cruft results
from C++'s attempt to be backward compatible with C. Stroustrup himself
has said in his retrospective book The Design and Evolution of
C++ (p. 207), “Within C++, there is a much smaller and
cleaner language struggling to get out.” [Many hackers would now add
“Yes, and it's called Java”
—ESR]
