Certainly we can say that Bjarne will insist he was right decades later. We can't necessarily guess - at the time - what it is he will have "always" believed decades later though.

You made me laugh!...Bjarne indeed can't be accused of being a modest man. And by some accounts, he's quite a political animal.

But in fairness, when was D&E first published? Argued for auto there, long before their acceptance. Argued for implicit template instantiation - thank god the "everything-must-be-explicit" curmudgeons were vanquished there, too.

He's got a pretty good batting average - certainly better than Herb Sutter.

Integer promotion? - Stroustroup pleads C source compat else stillborn.

Initializes lists suck mainly because of C source compat constraints, too. In fact, most things that suck in C++ came from B via C.