Bjarne Stroustrup, author of The C++ Programming Language

I like my code to be elegant and efficient. The
logic should be straightforward to make it hard
for bugs to hide, the dependencies minimal to
ease maintenance, error handling complete
according to an articulated strategy, and per-
formance close to optimal so as not to tempt
people to make the code messy with unprinci-
pled optimizations. Clean code does one thing
well.

>>7
the thing is, I like the idea behind templates. what I don't like is template syntax. C-style preprocessor macros have many problems but in practice I like it far more than heavily templated code