Designed by Bjarne Stroustrup of AT&T Bell Labs as a successor
to C. Now one of the
languages of choice, although many hackers still grumble that it is the
successor to either Algol 68 or Ada (depending on
generation), and a prime example of
second-system effect. Almost anything that can be done in any language can
be done in C++, but it requires a language lawyer to
know what is and what is not legal — the design is
almost too large to hold in even hackers' heads. Much
of the cruft results from C++'s attempt to be
backward compatible with C. Stroustrup himself has said in his
retrospective book The Design and Evolution of C++
(p. 207), Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language
struggling to get out.
[Many hackers would now add Yes, and
it's called Java
—ESR]