to transport an algorithm—to say, "I wrote it; here, take it." It's way too big, way too complex. And it's obviously built by a committee. Stroustrup campaigned for years and years and years, way beyond any sort of technical contributions he made to the language, to get it adopted and used. And he sort of ran all the standards committees with a whip and a chair. And he said "no" to no one. He put every feature in that language that ever existed. It wasn't cleanly designed—it was just the union of everything that came along. And I think it suffered drastically from that. However Brian Kernighan, also a colleague at Bell Labs, disputes this assessment: C++ has been enormously influential. ... Lots of people say C++ is too big and too complicated etc. etc. but in fact it is a very powerful language and pretty much everything that is in there is there for a really sound reason: it is not somebody doing random invention, it is actually people trying to solve real world problems. Now a lot of the programs that we take for granted today, that we just use, are C++ programs. Stroustrup himself comments that C++ semantics are much cleaner than its syntax: "within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out". Other complaints may include a lack of reflection or garbage collection, long compilation times, perceived feature creep, and verbose error messages, particularly from template metaprogramming. See also Comparison of programming languages List of C++ compilers Outline of C++ :Category:C++ libraries Footnotes References Further reading External links JTC1/SC22/WG21 – the ISO/IEC C++ Standard Working Group Standard C++ Foundation – a non-profit organization that promotes the use and understanding of standard C++. Bjarne Stroustrup is a director of the organization. Algol programming language family C++ programming language family Class-based programming languages Cross-platform software High-level programming languages Object-oriented programming languages Programming languages created in 1983 Programming languages with an ISO standard Statically typed programming languages