[CyberEldrich]

Bjarne Stroustrup: Remember the Vasa! (2018) https://open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers/2018/p0977r0...

Bjarne Stroustrup 2018: We are on a path to disaster though enthusiasm and design-by-committee (or rather “design-by-committees”). During the early days of WG21 the story of the Vasa was popular as warning against overelaboration (from 1992):

“Please also understand that there are dozens of reasonable extensions and changes being proposed. If every extension that is reasonably well-defined, clean and general, and would make life easier for a couple of hundred or couple of thousand C++ programmers were accepted, the language would more than double in size. We do not think this would be an advantage to the C++ community.”

“We often remind ourselves of the good ship Vasa. It was to be the pride of the Swedish navy and was built to be the biggest and most beautiful battleship ever. Unfortunately, to accommodate enough statues and guns it underwent major redesigns and extension during construction. The result was that it only made it half way across Stockholm harbor before a gust of wind blew it over and it sank killing about 50 people.”

“It has been raised and you can now see it in a museum in Stockholm. It is a beauty to behold - far more beautiful at the time than its unextended first design and far more beautiful today than if it had suffered the usual fate of a 17th century battle ship -- but that is no consolation to its designer, builders, and intended users.”