A person. C ++ Creator Bjarne Straustrup, who “never loved” programming languages

The C ++ creator had very few chances to “go out in people”: a poor family, the worst school in the city, and lack of clearly expressed aptitudes towards something. He was not even "genius."

This is a man who can be called self-made. His main goal was to achieve real success in anything.
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Perhaps we were all lucky that he "brought" in programming. Because now it is very difficult to imagine a modern IT industry without the C ++ legacy.

Bjarne Straustrup was born on December 30, 1950 in the Danish city of Aarhus. This is the second largest (250 thousand inhabitants) city of Denmark, located on the east coast of Jutland.

Despite the fact that his parents were not “academics,” he did well at school. Although, as Bjarne later found out, it was one of the worst schools in the city.

In childhood, the future engineer loved to play football, ride a bike. In addition, he was a scout. Like most boys at the time, Stroustrup earned money by supplying newspapers and milk.

After graduation, he still entered the local University in the department of computer technology. Bjarne admitted that he could become an architect, a historian, and a sociologist. But in the end he settled on mathematics and computer science. His decision was influenced by a school math teacher who instilled in the boy a love for this science.

University

He first met the computer already in the walls of the university. Algol-60 was the first programming language that Bjarne learned.



Aarhus University was in the top 100 universities in the world. Stroustrup thought with fear that he would have to work as a math teacher if there was no job in the field of programming. He was convinced that mathematics should have a practical application.

However, in his second year he understood that programming, and computer technology in general, is not only and not so much mathematics. In addition, it turned out that Bjarne was not as good at math as he thought.

In an interview, Straustrup outlined his position on learning programming:

I rate education above training courses. In most cases, I will choose a specialist with a broad outlook and deep basic knowledge than someone with a certificate of completion of highly specialized courses. In general, my ideal is a combination of academic knowledge and practical skills.

In his university years, Straustrup worked by writing small programs for the Burroughs business unit in Aarhus. Then he realized that commercial development has little to do with writing programs for himself or friends, and even more so, with the implementation of laboratory work at the university. Bjarne got the experience of communicating with users, the experience of support and maintenance code.

A student spent part of the money to pay for his own tuition. In addition to benefiting himself, his developments helped bring the company to a new level: Burroughs later merged with Sperry, which resulted in Unisys, a global manufacturer of integrated software and hardware solutions.

In addition, the student developed software and for the needs of the university. In 1975, Straustrup graduated from it and received a master's degree.

Cambridge

Towards the end of training, Bjarne became interested in microprogramming. Interest increased after an internship at Cambridge. Therefore, Stroustrup moved to England to continue his education at Cambridge University. There was all the necessary equipment for research in the field of microprogramming.



In addition, the new university helped him raise the demands on himself. In this university, the level of students and teachers was much higher than at Aarhus University. This motivated Stroustrup to develop more actively.

In Cambridge, in the Computing Laboratory, he was engaged in the design of distributed systems. In 1979, Bjarne received his doctorate.

In the same year, Straustrup and his wife, Marian, moved to New Jersey (USA), where he began working at the Center for Computer Research of Bell Labs. At that time, the company was in "friendly" relations with the University of Cambridge.

C ++

When Stroustrup was engaged in research in the company, he needed to write several simulation programs to simulate distributed computing. SIMULA-67 - an object-oriented language - could be an ideal tool for solving such problems, if not for its relatively low speed of program execution. By the way, this language Bjarne used even while writing his dissertation in Cambridge - there he developed a simulator of distributed systems.

Prior to this, Stroustrup's interests did not include the development of programming languages. He was interested in microprogramming, operating systems, computer architecture, development of virtual machines. True, before graduating from university, he managed to study twenty programming languages. But despite this, Bjarne argues that he still did not have much interest in languages.

However, Straustrup decided to start work on a new programming language.

If you have to choose between writing "good" and "fast" code, it means that there is something wrong here. Because “good” code must be “fast,” Stroustrup explains his position in an interview.

Thus, the C ++ programming language was created, originally called “C with classes” (C with classes). The name “C ++” was coined by Rick Maschitti. "++" is an increment operator in C, which seems to hint that the C ++ language is more than just C.

In 1983, the language has undergone significant changes. Stroustrup developed its language in such a way that the code was not compiled into a machine language, but transformed into a set of C preprocessor commands. This opened access to it for hundreds of thousands of C-programmers who had the appropriate compiler.

In 1984, Bell Labs was reorganized and given the name AT & T Bell Labs. The first to whom the company offered C ++, and practically free of charge, were universities.

In 1985, Straustrup published one of the most widely known books, The C ++ Programming Language, which was published in four editions (1985, 1991, 1997, 2000), and was translated into 19 languages.



As Tom Duffy writes: “Many discoveries owe their origin to chance. But there are quite a few others that were made possible through hard work and foresight. The C ++ programming language, first proposed by Bell Labs to universities in 1985, certainly falls into the second category. ”

Community formation

The language quickly found its audience. In 1987, 200 people gathered at the C ++ conference. The following year, the number of participants increased to 600, and at the beginning of the 90s the number of developers in C ++ was approaching 500 thousand. This made this language the world leader in speed of distribution.

In 1990, another book of Straustrup - The Annotated C ++ Reference Manual, a guide to the C ++ programming language with comments, was published, which was later awarded for its excellence in technical documentation according to Dr. magazine Dobb's Journal.

In addition, according to the Fortune magazine version, Straustrup was recognized as one of the "twelve best young American scientists."

Stroustrup, meanwhile, continued to work at AT & T Bell Labs, where he headed the large-scale programmatic research unit, actively engaged in improving his language and creating its standard. The ANSI / ISO C ++ standard was released in 1999.

Stroustrup was head of programming research at Bell Labs from 1995 to 2002.

Bjarne Straustrup - on C / C ++

“I came up with C ++, wrote down its original definition and executed the first implementation. I chose and formulated the criteria for designing C ++, developed its basic capabilities and was responsible for the fate of the proposals for extending the language in the C ++ Standardization Committee, the author wrote. - The C ++ language owes a lot to the C language, and the C language remains a subset of the C ++ language (but in C ++ several serious gaps in the C type system are eliminated). I also saved C tools that are low enough to cope with the most critical system tasks. The C language, in turn, owes much to its predecessor, BCPL. ”

In 2003, in an interview, Straustrup spoke about his attitude to the problems of compatibility with C and C ++:

I think that the existing problems of incompatibility of C and C ++ are the worst thing that could happen in the history of these languages. Ideally, these languages ​​should be combined. And it seems to me that this is technically feasible only if changes are made in both languages. However, because of the reluctance to make these changes, the languages ​​continue to drift apart, poisoning the lives of virtually every C and C ++ developer.

I'm trying to get people to see the positives in the pool. I wrote a series of articles on this topic. But someone is interested in this to happen. In addition, I do not see much interest from the community. Probably the majority, as usual, hopes that everything will “resolve itself”.

After AT & T Bell Labs

Since 2002, Bjarne has been a professor at Texas A & M University (Texas A & M University). He worked in the industry for almost a quarter of a century, so he has something to say to students.

In addition, he collaborates with Columbia University as a visiting teacher-professor of computer science.

In 2014, Bjarne offered a job to one of the largest financial conglomerates in the world - Morgan Stanley.

Stroustrup began to cooperate with this company, as he decided to return from the sphere of pure pedagogy to the solution of real problems. His vast experience proved useful to Morgan Stanley Bank in solving issues related to performance, reliability and security.

In addition, he wanted to move to New York to be closer to his children and grandchildren.

Bjarne Straustrup was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in the United States (“National Academy of Engineering”) in 2004 with the wording “for creating the C ++ language”. As the first computer scientist, he received the award ("William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement from Sigma Xi") of the American research community in 2005. He also received the IEEE Computer Community Award “for starting the development and commercialization of object-oriented software development technology and for the great changes made to business and industry.”