THE BEST SOFTWARE WRITING I

Eric JohnsonC++—THE FORGOTTENTROJAN HORSE¹

I know programmers who started using C++ solely to get the ability to use "//" as a comment delimiter. C++ definitely owes a lot of its popularity to the fact that any legal ANSI-C program was also a C++ program that pretty much did the same thing. – Ed.

I find C++ interesting. No, not because my compiler can spit out an incoherent set of errors if I fail to include all of the right headers to appease the angry STL gods. And, no, not because its population of practitioners has reached a steady state and is now beginning a slow decline.

I find it interesting because there's a lesson to be learned about how it conquered an existing community. The tactic it took was deceptively simple yet it's one that ...