Opening line: "Stefan Karpinski was building a software tool that could simulate the behavior of wireless networks, and his code was a complete mess. But it was

Opening line: "Stefan Karpinski was building a software tool that could simulate the behavior of wireless networks, and his code was a complete mess. But it wasn’t his fault." Interestingly, it was Bjarne Stroustrup's experience implementing a distributed system simulator in Simula that lead to him working on what became C++. He liked the architecture of the code, but it was too slow for him to get any results. He reimplemented the whole thing in BCPL, and that experience got him interested in having a fast language that provided Simula-like abstractions. I originally read this anecdote in his book "The Design and Evolution of C++", but it's also in the beginning of his History of Programming Languages paper: http://www.stroustrup.com/hopl2.pdf http://www.stroustrup.com/hopl2.pdf