They also started, if I'm doing my arithmetic right, in 1996. Honestly, I could see C++ having been their best choice back then. Every language I would rather do a large project in is either newer than that or would have been pretty immature for a large project in the mid-90s.
I worked on a mega-LoC (millions of lines of code) C++ project in the late 90s. It wasn't even (to the extent I could honestly tell at that point in my career, anyway) a particularly hellish codebase or design, and suffered none of the madnesses described in The Fine Article.
(Of course, we were sub-sub-contractors working only on designated parts of the application. The stuff I did touch was consistently sane enough, though, that I don't think I'm too out of place in positing a legit minimal degree of not-terribleness across the rest of the project.)
My first job involved a 6 hour compile caused by that someone desperately had tried to beat a braindead homemade interpreted language into submission using a c preprocessor stage. Function calls where largely macro expansions...
All errors was reported as : syntax error on line 1. Fun times.
