CS Department hosts C++ Creator
Andrew Scagnelli
Issue date: 12/4/09 Section: Campus News
On Wednesday, December 2, the Stevens Computer Science department hosted the first of a series of lectures delivered by high-profile speakers. The lecturer for the event was Bjarne Stroustrup, whose work on the C++ language has made him world renowned. His talk focused on three main areas: what led to the creation of C++, how C++ is used today and the process for approving and standardizing the next generation of C++, C++0x.
Stroustrup's first topic covered the creation of C++. The language, originally called "C with Classes," was created in 1980 and finally accepted by the International Standards Organization (ISO) in 1998 as C++98. Because of its unique combination of system-level code and object-oriented programming, the language was quickly accepted in industry. Previous to then, programs had been written in four languages: assembler, FORTRAN, Simula, and C. Assembler, first used in 1951, and the language of the first modern program (a program able to run in the stored memory, or RAM, of a computer) was fast, but unreadable for humans, and did not make many inroads to industry. FORTRAN, created by IBM in 1956, was a different take on programming languages and preferred to express ideas in high-level ways, and espoused the mantra that "the expression of ideas [is] not limited to computers, so code should be portable." Simula introduced the idea of object-oriented programming in 1967, when Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard married the concepts of data with programming rules. Although the concepts created by Simula are still commonly used, the performance of programs in Simula was not acceptable for its time. The C programming language, created in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie, attempted to take the higher-level expressions and portability of FORTRAN while providing the speed present in assembler programs, and was wildly successful. Stroustrup built on these four previous languages by coupling the speed, portability, and higher-level expressions of C with the object-oriented model of Simula. He joked that he did it, "only because nobody ever told me I couldn't."
Stroustrup's first topic covered the creation of C++. The language, originally called "C with Classes," was created in 1980 and finally accepted by the International Standards Organization (ISO) in 1998 as C++98. Because of its unique combination of system-level code and object-oriented programming, the language was quickly accepted in industry. Previous to then, programs had been written in four languages: assembler, FORTRAN, Simula, and C. Assembler, first used in 1951, and the language of the first modern program (a program able to run in the stored memory, or RAM, of a computer) was fast, but unreadable for humans, and did not make many inroads to industry. FORTRAN, created by IBM in 1956, was a different take on programming languages and preferred to express ideas in high-level ways, and espoused the mantra that "the expression of ideas [is] not limited to computers, so code should be portable." Simula introduced the idea of object-oriented programming in 1967, when Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard married the concepts of data with programming rules. Although the concepts created by Simula are still commonly used, the performance of programs in Simula was not acceptable for its time. The C programming language, created in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie, attempted to take the higher-level expressions and portability of FORTRAN while providing the speed present in assembler programs, and was wildly successful. Stroustrup built on these four previous languages by coupling the speed, portability, and higher-level expressions of C with the object-oriented model of Simula. He joked that he did it, "only because nobody ever told me I couldn't."