When Bjarne Stroustrup—the designer and original implementer of C++—speaks to students, the message is rarely about chasing the next trend. In a recent university appearance in Spain, the veteran computer scientist used his time on stage to deliver a blunt reminder: learning to program by “just browsing the web” is a risky bet for anyone who wants professional-level skills.
Stroustrup’s warning is not anti-internet. It is anti-frictionless learning: the idea that an endless stream of tutorials, snippets, and “copy-paste fixes” can replace structured knowledge, deliberate practice, and exposure to high-quality material that reflects how modern software is actually built. Reports of his remarks framed the problem in practical terms—online content is often contradictory, context-free, or simply outdated, and that can quietly hard-wire bad habits that later become expensive to unlearn.
A talk about C++—and about how people learn the wrong lessons
The setting matters. Stroustrup visited the University of La Laguna (ULL) for a conference positioned around the present-day relevance of C++—a language created in the 1980s that still anchors enormous portions of the software stack, from systems software to performance-sensitive applications.
It is precisely because C++ remains widely used—and because it has evolved dramatically over the last decade—that Stroustrup sees a mismatch between how people think they are learning and what the job actually demands. Modern C++ is not merely “C with classes,” and learning it well is not equivalent to memorizing syntax or collecting tricks. It requires understanding memory models, object lifetimes, compilation, linking, ABI realities, concurrency, performance trade-offs, and how tooling exposes correctness problems.
In short: it is a language that punishes shallow knowledge—and the open web, in its lowest-quality form, is optimized for shallow knowledge.
The internet’s real problem: content drift and false confidence
Stroustrup’s critique lands at a moment when “learn to code” has been industrialized into a content economy. The web is full of guides written for older standards, older compilers, older best practices, or niche environments that are rarely disclosed. Even when an article is technically correct, it may be correct only under assumptions that beginners cannot yet recognize.
The result is a common failure mode in early-career developers:
- They can reproduce outcomes (a program runs), but cannot explain causes (why it works, why it breaks).
- They internalize unsafe patterns because they “worked once.”
- They struggle to debug beyond the surface, because the learning path never demanded mental models—only recipes.
Stroustrup has been unusually explicit for years about the danger of misattributed “quotes” and misinformation circulating online, maintaining a dedicated page to help readers verify what he has actually said. The impulse behind that page aligns with his broader point: without reliable sources and strong foundations, the internet can confidently teach you the wrong thing.
What he recommends instead: curated sources, current material, and depth
Coverage of his message at ULL highlights that Stroustrup has consistently encouraged learners to rely on credible, up-to-date references—especially books that track the modern language and teach programming as a disciplined craft rather than a collection of hacks.
Two titles frequently associated with his own recommendations are:
- A Tour of C++ (a fast but modern overview for readers who already program)
- Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ (a more foundational, pedagogy-driven path)
The deeper idea is not “books good, web bad.” It is: choose sources with editorial accountability and version-awareness, then use the web as a supplement—ideally to clarify, compare, and test your understanding, not to replace it.
Why this resonates in 2026: C++ is still here, and still changing
The warning also reflects C++’s unusual reality: it is both mature and in active evolution. New standards keep arriving; compilers keep improving; best practices keep shifting. A learner who relies on random tutorials can easily end up with a “museum version” of the language—one that compiles, but does not reflect how modern C++ teams write production software.
This is also why Stroustrup’s advice tends to sound “old-school” while being highly pragmatic: professional programming is as much about avoiding failure modes as it is about producing features. If you learn from fragmented, low-quality material, you inherit invisible liabilities—security issues, memory errors, concurrency bugs, maintainability debt—that become someone else’s incident later.
A practical way to use the web without letting it ruin your fundamentals
A reasonable interpretation of Stroustrup’s stance is not abstinence, but governance—treating online content like an untrusted input until verified. For learners (and for teams training juniors), that translates into a playbook:
- Anchor your learning in a current reference (a modern book, official documentation, or well-maintained course).
- Check the date and standard level (C++11/14/17/20/23) before trusting examples.
- Prefer primary sources for rules and language behavior (standard library references, compiler docs, reputable books).
- Treat snippets as hypotheses—test them with warnings enabled, sanitizers, and different compilers.
- Learn debugging and tooling early (build systems, CI basics, static analysis), so you can validate claims.
- Seek feedback loops: code review, exercises with constraints, and projects that force refactoring.
This is the difference between “knowing how to make it run” and “knowing what it means.”