Dear Bjarne,

Your language is broken. It was broken very early on, but at least it could be described in 200 pages of densely printed text. Now it has grown to insane proportions in ever more elaborate attempts to add feature upon feature in an effort to satisfy every possible programmers syntactic fetish. Until it is at the point where anyone attempting to use the language spends more time trying to master the tool, rather than using the tool to create the end result.

Because of the absurd feature set, it has become nearly impossible to master the full breadth of the language. This manifests itself in the worst way when you have a group of coders each knowing different features of the language, with only a small subset that makes up the intersection of every coders C++ skill. The end result is that programmer A spends half his/her time trying to figure out what programmer B did with the language, rather than the what problem the code was trying to solve.

The most important thing to teach about C++ is how not to use it. By that I mean teachers should be telling their students, "This language has a 1000 features (or is it 5000 now I lost count), you should only learn about 100." The key is which 100. It is great for low level coding, an improvement over C if used judiciously. If used to construct complex object systems it is a horrible choice. Higher level dynamic languages are the way to go.

Bjarne if C++ is to continue to be used, you need to stop dumping more garbage into the putrid landfill that C++ has become. Instead it should be stopped in its tracks, and the programming community should restart a new C extension that takes some of the useful ideas of C++, simplifies them, and carefully limits any attempt to add features without any real value. In short do what you completely failed to do.

Oh and Bjarne your language deity status is here by revoked due to abuse of power.