He also seems to spend most of his time enriching himself with bad pop science books and TV appearances. Maybe he did some useful science early in life but at this point he is NOT a scientist to admire or aspire to be.

Sing: "Send me your money."

So you nicely repeat the lies they have fed to you ?

What lies? That there are a bunch of murderous thugs trying to take over the Middle East and impose a 1500-year-old fascist dictatorship on the 99.9% of ordinary people that live there?

The lies about the suicide bombers with surgically-implanted bombs?

The Isis thing is once again financed by the Sauds. YOUR friends.

Yes, I know who finances them. They're not "my friends." I've never met any of them personally, and I don't approve of any of it, whichever of the warring sides you care to mention.

...and his side-kick Blair.

Anyway, the new dude is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and he's assimilating Irag, Syria and probably Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Somalia, Nigeria... you name it... into his all new "proper" Islam state.

A number of armies in the region are already squaring up, including Iran and Saudi. There have been some murders of Israeli and Palestinian teenagers by terrorists too, probably trying to goad each side into action.

It's a bloody miserable state of affairs.

Indeed, they're a swivel-eyed loon.

And C++ supports recursion, immutability, and the other hyped features of functional programming.

Yes, and at this rate, perhaps in another 20 years, it will have caught up with LISP (from the late 1950s).

And if you aren't a dumbass, you'll use ...

A simpler, more efficient high-level (higher than C++) language that is more expressive with fewer lines of code, less prone to introducing silly bugs caused by human error, and more readable by other programmers.

C++ is for those serious programmers who want to get real work done, and who don't have time to waste with overhyped crap.

C++ is for conformists and trend-followers lacking in enough critical thinking skills of their own to investigate and adopt better tools for the job.

That's what it is.

The end of quarter profit is what matters. Suck it up and take it like a man! Pull your weight like a true team player or you'll be let go to make way for a flexible, empowered, dedicated business-oriented go-getter from the thousands of them queuing up at the door.

If you can't do it right, or don't like it, get out. Don't drag the team down with you, loser.

Okay, there's the misunderstanding - I hadn't understood you were talking about automated pre-checkin testing. I still am not seeing the need for "multiple compilers, multiple OSes, and multiple binary architectures" mentioned by the original poster for a product that is intended for a single platform

Different compilers on the same platform find different bugs (warnings, errors).

Different static analysis tools also find different defects.

Different numbers of CPUs/Cores find different timing bugs, deadlocks, race conditions, corruption etc. on concurrent code.

Different binary architectures show up endianness bugs and subtle corruption bugs due to alignment of data in memory.

Different OSs find different run-time behaviour problems and dependency problems. They also find problems in any OS abstraction code.

The more compilers. analysers, machines, architectures and OSs you use, the more bugs you find, and the more bugs you find and fix, the higher the quality of your product.

It's always easiest to develop on top of a high-quality code base. That's when you're fastest.

You don't need a QA department. Automation can get you 80-90% of the benefit.

You don't need to do everything all at once. Start adding new tests, builds and platforms as you go, a bit at a time. You should see your velocity increase very soon.

C and C++ were designed on the principle that the fundamental language constructs should be as fast as possible.

C was designed to be as simple (and flexible) as possible. It (the compiler) had to run on tiny machines, by modern standards. Speed (of the object code) is a consequence/coincidence of the simplicity of the language and the fact that simpler languages tend to produce tighter (and faster) object code when compiled.

C's simplicity can be summed up by the following rule of thumb: if something can be calculated at compile time, the language usually supports it. Everything else (like handling array dimensions and strings) are left up to the programmer.

When computers were small and slow, C was ideal for programming them when FORTH wasn't big enough.

c++ is great.

Keep repeating it often enough and people will believe you.