Science Quote by Bjarne Stroustrup

Stroustrup isn’t daydreaming about language purity here; he’s putting a finger on the unglamorous chokepoint where “standards” either become real or stay ceremonial. By leading with “First,” he frames everything else as secondary: before new features, before evangelism, before yet another debate about what C++ “should be,” the ecosystem has to stop freelancing. The list that follows-compilers, debuggers, profilers, database interfaces, GUI builders, CAD tools-isn’t decoration. It’s a map of power. These are the gatekeepers that decide what code gets written, what behaviors become de facto, and which parts of the language developers quietly avoid because tooling makes them painful.

The subtext is a seasoned engineer’s skepticism toward standards that exist mainly on paper. ISO conformance sounds like bureaucratic box-checking until you remember how software is actually produced: through toolchains, vendor decisions, and “works on my machine” compromises. If the debugger can’t interpret standard constructs, if the profiler misreads templates, if a GUI builder assumes nonstandard extensions, then the effective language is whatever the tools tolerate-not what the committee ratified.

Context matters: Stroustrup lived through C++’s long maturation from a powerful, messy hybrid into a formally standardized language, with vendors historically shipping partial implementations and competing extensions. This quote is an argument for legitimacy through infrastructure. It’s also a quiet plea to stop blaming the language for the ecosystem’s shortcuts. The ISO standard is the contract; the tools are the courts that enforce it.