After the "toy" languages of Basic and Pascal, my first real programming language was PDP11 Macro-11 Assembly. At the end of that programming class, the final a

After the "toy" languages of Basic and Pascal, my first real programming language was PDP11 Macro-11 Assembly. At the end of that programming class, the final assignment combined all the prior assignments and to the entire class's surprise we had a C compiler. From that laying a foundation experience, I felt extremely comfortable when learning and working in C for a good 20 years after graduation. C++ appeared first as a pre-processor for C, and then took over as the primary compiled language with C treated as a less favored step child. Over the years, my experience has been those that tried to embrace the entire language shot themselves in the feet over and over again: template programming has always been unstable and difficult, operator overloading is a recipe for mistakes, and complex object hierarchies over designed to a fault. Nobody appears to follow the Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) principal anymore. If there's complexity, it should be innate to the product, and not reflected by how to product is constructed internally. The portion of the talk where it is discussed how many parameters and features of software are never used hit my experience the sharpest. Keep Is Simple!!!