Stroustrup is the beloved creator of C++, but C++ is decidedly not governed by a benevolent dictator; a very large and active Committee guides its future: https://isocpp.org/std/the-committee

I have to say that I have a lot of respect for the man.

Many project leaders/creators position themselve "authoritative god" on their project, and finished often disconnected from their community taking arbitrary wrong decisions.

Bjarne has been smarter than that, giving the community (a very diversified community ) the opportunity to drive the language together.

And it worked, C++ survived 40 years, stronger than ever, evolving from a primitive "C with class" to a modern language present in almost every electronic device nowadays.

It might not be "perfect", "pure", but it does not matter. It fucking work... and evolve in the right direction... That's the C++ way.

In addition to benefiting from many smart people at the helm, instead of just one, it also benefits from having no real single points of failure. It has a multitude of cooperative leaders, support from many large and even small corporations, and many implementations as well as its formal Standard (which after the long wait for C++0x, has had a number of good, well-adopted updates).

All things considered the committee did quite well, but sometimes I think that Bjatne might have abdicated his position too early and the language might have benefited of a strongly opinionated dictator with veto powers for a while longer.

The future looks great, the language is improving and makes it easier and easier to write safe, and fast code with improved readability.