Bjarne Stroustrup

Creator of the C++ programming language

• Born: December 30, 1950
• Place of Birth: Aarhus, Denmark

Primary Company/Organization: Bell Laboratories

Introduction

Bjarne Stroustrup created the C++ language, the first widely used object-oriented programming language, and became a highly influential spokesperson on issues such as the design of programming languages, education in computer science, and the philosophy of computer programming. Stroustrup also wrote influential books on programming, helped develop standards for C++, and taught at several institutions.

Early Life

Bjarne Stroustrup was born and raised in Aarhus, Denmark, to a working-class family (his father was an upholsterer, his mother a secretary). As a child, he preferred sports to academic pursuits, foreshadowing his contrarian tendencies. He studied at the University of Aarhus, receiving his master's degree in mathematics and computer science. While in school, he also acquired a great deal of practical experience doing contract programming for business applications and later reflected on the appeal that practical work held for him. Stroustrup then continued his studies in the United Kingdom, earning his PhD in computer science from Cambridge University in 1979; his topic was distributed computing, and his thesis adviser was David Wheeler. While at Cambridge, Stroustrup shared office space with Jeremy Dion, Mark Pezzaro, David Harper, Neil Grey, and Bruce Croft; he would also cite Roger Needham as an influence on his intellectual development. Stroustrup later became a fellow of Churchill College.

After graduation from Cambridge, Stroustrup was invited to work at Bell Laboratories. The company was also the professional home of Dennis Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson, who played key roles in developing the C programming language and the Unix operating system.

Life's Work

While at Cambridge University, Stroustrup became interested in distributed computing. He continued this work at Bell Labs but found that existing programming languages were inadequate to the tasks. Languages such as C were essentially linear, and Stroustrup became interested in object-oriented programming as an alternative way to organize work within a computer program. In an object-oriented language, programs are organized around classes and objects, rather than routines, and lend themselves more naturally to distributed computing.

Stroustrup worked in the AT&T Labs Research section of Bell Labs, and within this section of the Labs headed the Large-Scale Programming Research Department until leaving in 2002 to become a professor of computer science at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. However, he remained an AT&T Fellow until 2012, thus maintaining a connection with AT&T Labs. Stroustrup held the chair of computer science in the College of Engineering at Texas A&M.

Stroustrup's work on C++ grew out of his graduate work in distributed computing; as part of a project to distribute Unix over a network, he developed the "C with classes" language (the earliest name for C++), building on the C language developed by Ritchie and Thompson. Compatibility with C has been cited as both a strength and a weakness of C++. On the positive side, people working in C++ have access to all the features of C and are able to put to use the large quantities of C code already written. On the negative side, the decision to keep C++ compatible with C meant that the new language had to accommodate many peculiarities of the old.

Stroustrup originally worked with an object-oriented language called Simula but decided it was too inefficient for his purposes. He also wanted to capitalize on the popularity of the C language and thus decided to extend C by adding object-oriented features to it rather than creating an entirely new language; this extended version of C was named C++. This new language became extremely popular, in part because it was easy to use, not only because many programmers were also working in the C language but also because Stroustrup wrote a textbook, The C++ Programming Language, which has seen several editions and made it easy for programmers to learn the new language. Stroustrup exerted considerable effort to standardize C++, in part because he was concerned that the language could degenerate into a series of "dialects" that would not be compatible.

Despite its widespread adoption and influence on other languages, C++ has also been criticized over the years. One of the most serious criticisms is that C++ allows programmers to make serious errors; Stroustrup himself has said, in essence, that while C++ has solved some of the problems with C that allow a coder to shoot themselves in the foot, C++ includes other features that allow a coder to blow off an entire leg. Because of its large number of features and flexibility, C++ is often perceived as overly complex and unnecessarily difficult to learn. Interestingly, Stroustrup argued, in an interview with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review, that a good computer language should help people solve problems and express their ideas and that an emphasis on the elegance of a language for its own sake is a mistake. Stroustrup emphasized in the same interview that he did not design the language with the goal of corporate efficiency in mind, but included expert features that perhaps only a small number of programmers would be able to use well; in this choice, he cites the influence of Søren Kierkegaard and the idea of valuing the exceptional individual rather than catering to the average crowd. In other interviews, he has identified C++ as a product of his own individual work; in contrast to the way many languages and computing projects are developed, C++ was not developed by a committee.

At Texas A&M, Stroustrup taught, conducted research, and was a member of the Parasol Lab. He was involved in the development of the Standard Template Adaptive Parallel Library (STAPL), a framework to develop parallel programs in C++. He also founded the Programming Techniques, Tools, and Languages Group in 2003, within the Parasol Lab. He also served as an honorary professor at Xi'an Jiaoton University from 2002 to 2006 and as an honorary professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Aarhus from 2010 to 2015. Stroustrup left Texas A&M in 2014 and took up a position as a visiting professor at Columbia University. He also became managing director of technology for the financial company Morgan Stanley. He was promoted to the company's first Technical Fellow in 2019. He retired on April 2, 2022, though he continued to serve as a professor at Columbia.

Stroustrup received many honors during his career. In 1990, he was named one of America's top twelve young scientists by Fortune magazine. In 1993, he received the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for his work on C++, and he became an ACM Fellow and a Bell Laboratories Fellow. In 1995, the same year he became an AT&T Fellow, Byte magazine named him one of the twenty most influential people in the computer industry. In 2004, Stroustrup was awarded the Computer Entrepreneur Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his work on developing an object-oriented language and the subsequent influence of object-oriented programming on industry and business; in the same year, he became a member of the Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, and Science and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 2005, he became a Fellow of the IEEE and won the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement from the scientific research society Sigma Xi. In 2008, he received Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award, for individuals who have advanced software development.

In 2010 Stroustrup was awarded the Rigmor and Carl Holst-Knudsen Award for Scientific Research from the University of Aarhus, the oldest and most prestigious honor in science for people associated with that university. He received the Dahl-Nygaard Prize in 2015 and was inducted as a fellow of the Computer History Museum. In 2017 he won the Faraday Medal from the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and in 2018 he won the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the IEEE Computer Society's Computer Pioneer Award, and the John Scott Legacy Medal and Premium from the Franklin Institute and the City Council of Philadelphia.

Personal Life

Stroustrup and his wife, Marian Stroustrup, had two children together. Their daughter, Annemarie, was born while Stroustrup was a student at Cambridge University, and their son, Nicholas, was born in Watchung, New Jersey, while Stroustrup was working at Bell Labs. Annemarie became a physician and a professor of pediatrics at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, while Nicholas pursued a career in systems biology. In retirement, Stroustrup and his wife lived in New York City to be near their children and grandchildren.

Bibliography

Biancuzzi, Federico, and Shane Warden. Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages. Sebastopol: O'Reilly, 2009. Print.

Pontin, Jason. "More Trouble with Programming." Technology Review 7 Dec. 2006: n. pag. Print.

"Some Information About Bjarne Stroustrup." Bjarne Stroustrup Website, 1 Nov. 2022, www.stroustrup.com/bio.html. Accessed 5 Mar. 2024.

Stroustrup, Bjarne. The C++ Programming Language. 4th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2012. Print.

Stroustrup, Bjarne. The Design and Evolution of C++. Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1995. Print.

Stroustrup, Bjarne. A Tour of C++. 3rd ed. Addison-Wesley Professional, 2022. Print.

Stroustrup, Bjarne. "Viewpoint: What Should We Teach New Software Developers? Why?" Communications of the ACM 53.1 (2010): 40–42. Print.