maybe this will help you Stroustrup: Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little

maybe this will help you Stroustrup: Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little. I thought 'I wonder what would happen, if there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with programmers? Actually, I got some of the ideas from X10, you know, X windows. That was such a bitch of a graphics system, that it only just ran on those Sun 3/60 things. They had all the ingredients for what I wanted. A really ridiculously complex syntax, obscure functions, and pseudo-OO structure. Even now, nobody writes raw X-windows code. Motif is the only way to go if you want to retain your sanity. [NJW Comment: That explains everything. Most of my thesis work was in raw X-windows. :)] Interviewer: You're kidding...? Stroustrup: Not a bit of it. In fact, there was another problem. Unix was written in 'C', which meant that any 'C' programmer could very easily become a systems programmer. Remember what a mainframe systems programmer used to earn? Interviewer: You bet I do, that's what I used to do. Stroustrup: OK, so this new language had to divorce itself from Unix, by hiding all the system calls that bound the two together so nicely. This would enable guys who only knew about DOS to earn a decent living too. Interviewer: I don't believe you said that... source: http://members.safe-t.net/jwalker/programming/interview.html http://members.safe-t.net/jwalker/programming/interview.html