Science Quote by Bjarne Stroustrup

Stroustrup is doing something disarmingly political here: he’s talking about “clean” bindings, but he’s really defending C++’s right to stay relevant in an era when the center of gravity was shifting upward from languages to system-level standards. COM and CORBA weren’t just APIs; they were power plays. If your language didn’t interface smoothly, it didn’t merely lose elegance points - it lost enterprise adoption, tooling investment, and mindshare.

The intent is pragmatic, but the subtext is protective. Standards bodies and platform vendors were increasingly defining how software components talked, how they were deployed, how they were versioned. That kind of infrastructure can quietly demote a language into a “leaf node”: fine for internal algorithms, awkward for real-world integration. Stroustrup’s insistence on bindings that are “clean, well documented, and simple to use” is a pushback against the historic C++ tax: accidental complexity smuggled in through leaky abstractions, fragile IDL mappings, and documentation that assumes you already know the ritual.

Context matters: COM’s Windows-centric, binary-compatibility obsession and CORBA’s cross-vendor ambition both clashed with C++’s strengths and worst habits. C++ can be close to the metal, but it also offers enough rope to hang an interoperability story. Stroustrup is arguing that interoperability shouldn’t feel like punishment. The rhetorical trick is that “simple to use” isn’t a plea for beginner-friendliness; it’s a demand that systems-level standards not force developers into superstition, boilerplate, and undefined behavior just to participate in modern software ecosystems.