The first part of this interview engendered such debate in the comments section of our site, as well as on aggregator sites like Slashdot, that Technology Review chose to address some of the objections to C++ raised by readers.

Technology Review: Name the coolest and lamest programs ever written in C++, and say what worked and didn't work.

Bjarne Stroustrup: Google! Can you even remember the world before Google? (It was only five years ago, after all.) What I like about Google is its performance under severe resource constraints. It possesses some really neat parallel and distributed algorithms. Also, the first Web browsers. Can you imagine the world without the Web? (It was only about 10 years ago.) Other programs that I find cool are examples of embedded-systems code: the scene-analysis and autonomous driving systems of the Mars Rovers, a fuel-injection control for a huge marine engine. There is also some really cool code in Photoshop's image processing and user interfaces. What I like about these programs is how they are structured to be reliable and responsive under pretty harsh resource constraints. Some of Photoshop's ways of managing internal complexity (for instance, the graphical user interface [GUI] layout and access from image-processing algorithms to the pixel data) are just beautiful.

If you look at code itself, rather than considering the resulting program, we could look at something like Shape [an abstract class that defines an interface by which shapes like circles and rectangles can be manipulated in C++], which I borrowed from Simula. It's still the language-technical base of most GUIs, such as the one on your computer or your iPod, or whatever. A more modern example would be the find or the sort algorithm in the Standard Template Library [STL] in C++. That's the language technical basis for much modern high-performance C++ code, especially of programs that need to do simple operations on lots of data. What is common to these examples of code is that they cleanly separate concerns in a program, allowing separate developments of parts. That simplifies understanding and eases maintenance. These basic language techniques allow separate "things" to be separately represented in code and combined only when needed. However, code is something appreciated by programmers, rather than most people. I have always been a bit envious of graphics people, robotics people, etc. What they do is so concrete and visible; what I do is invariably invisible and incomprehensible to most people. I know many mathematicians feel the same way.

Sorry, I'm not going to shame anyone by naming their work "the lamest C++ program ever." It's oh so tempting . . . but no, it wouldn't be fair.

TR: Following structured programming (of which the best known example is Pascal) and object-oriented programming (your own C++), what will be the next big conceptual shift in the design of programming languages? Some years ago, Technology Review put its money on aspect-oriented programming. Does AO represent a conceptual shift of the same kind that OO did?

BS: I hope you didn't put too much money on it! I don't see aspect-oriented programming escaping the "academic ghetto" any day soon, and if it does, it will be less pervasive than OO. When it works, aspect-oriented programming is elegant, but it's not clear how many applications significantly benefit from its use. Also, with AO, it appears difficult to integrate the necessary tools into an industrial-scale programming environment.