Well, there's certainly a lot of "bloated" code. I'm using quotation marks because I'm coming from a point of view where 'lean and mean' is golden - I like beau

Well, there's certainly a lot of "bloated" code. I'm using quotation marks because I'm coming from a point of view where 'lean and mean' is golden - I like beautiful code iff the implementation of the pretty abstractions is equally beautiful. Also, the language is so huge, that it's practically impossible to learn all of it in any reasonably short amount of time. Most people learn to use the features they need, and skip the rest entirely. That has led to a lot of controversy about the language (see the weekly rants about C++, and some that popped up last week, they're pretty funny). I've also found that proper design is indeed a more demanding task in C++ than C. I think that's reasonable, with all the features at work, you need to be sure you're not using a cannon to kill mosquitoes. Also, I got this colleague who has said the same thing written in the article about references and pointers. That didn't feel like a joke to me. :( But the idea of Unix++? Man, I blew orange juice all over my desk. I can't help but think it might be true. :-D