There is no one "root of all evil" in software development. Design is hard in many ways. People tend to underestimate the intellectual and practical difficulties involved in building a significant system involving software. It is not and will not be reduced to a simple mechanical "assembly line" process. Creativity, engineering principles, and evolutionary change are needed to create a satisfactory large system.

To many managers, getting rid of the arrogant, undisciplined, over-paid, technology-obsessed, improperly-dressed etc. programmers would appear to be a significant added benefit

With the increasing importance of standards for system-level objects such as COM and CORBA, it is particularly important that the C++ bindings to those be clean, well documented, and simple to use.

Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.

The first law of computer science: Every problem is solved by yet another indirection.

It is easy to study the rules of overloading and of templates without noticing that together they are one of the keys to elegant and efficient type-safe containers.

People who passionately want to believe that the world is basically simple react to this with a fury that goes beyond what I consider appropriate for discussing a programming language.