Yes but not in this case. It says it's made up at the bottom of the interview.

Heh, but it's not entirely made up. Mentor Graphics really did epically fail when they tried that rewrite and it was a major event in C++ history, seeing as how they had (informal?) support from Bell Labs etc. etc.

This very useful book covers it a bit in the intro: http://www.amazon.com/Taming-Pattern-Classes-Persistence-Pro...

The number one lesson learned from that experience according to the author and my memory was "Make your class hierarchies directed acyclic graphs" ... which of course wasn't a C++ issue at all. As the first widely adopted OO language C++ gets a lot of mostly undeserved flack for being the medium in which a lot of us learned the OO paradigm.

A bit like how all those companies that oversold expert systems in the '80s blamed Lisp for their problems, causing both AI and Lisp winters.

I know. I read it.

You are right. This text is from 1998. An another decade passed and still no one gets the joke...