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...