Confession by Scott Meyers from the article linked by "zerr"; I’ll begin with what many of you will find an unredeemably damning confession: I have not written

Confession by Scott Meyers from the article linked by "zerr"; I’ll begin with what many of you will find an unredeemably damning confession: I have not written production software in over 20 years, and I have never written production software in C++. Nope, not ever. Furthermore, I’ve never even tried to write production software in C++, so not only am I not a real C++ developer, I’m not even a wannabe. Counterbalancing this slightly is the fact that I did write research software in C++ during my graduate school years (1985-1993), but even that was small (a few thousand lines) single-developer to-be-thrown-away-quickly stuff. And since striking out as a consultant over a dozen years ago, my C++ programming has been limited to toy “let’s see how this works” (or, sometimes, “let’s see how many compilers this breaks”) programs, typically programs that fit in a single file. (make? Who needs stinkin’ make?) My living is based on C++, but it’s not by virtue of the programs I write in it. Donald Knuth wrote TeX and related tools which are huge/complicated software over and above his Algorithms/Computer Science Theory contributions. He stands alone in his greatness. Scott Meyers is not even in the same league. He is a "consultant" (with all the good and the bad which goes with this profession) and in the same group containing the eXtreme Programming/Agile/Scrum crowd.