As far as I am concerned, Stroustrup's greatest contributions to programmer are these three quotes, all from thre 2nd Edition of The C++ Programming Language:
"The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build."
"There are no 'cookbook' methods that can replace intelligence, experience and good taste in design and programming."
"Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost."
So true, so important, and so universally applicable.
I think he also said something along the lines of: don't introduce a class over a struct if you are not trying to maintain an invariant. Very good advice.
My impression is he would have wanted to but he was limited by that era's technology. Quoting from the article:
> If you could go back in time and change one thing about the original implementation of C++, what would it be?
> I don’t have a time machine and I shouldn’t try to second-guess 1983-vintage Bjarne—he knew the conditions at the time better than I do now, and any significant change probably wouldn’t have fitted in the 1MB memory I had to work with, and if it had maybe I wouldn’t have been able to port the compiler to an early 640MB Windows machine.
"The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build."
"There are no 'cookbook' methods that can replace intelligence, experience and good taste in design and programming."
"Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost."
So true, so important, and so universally applicable.