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posted by martyb on Thursday January 04 2018, @03:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the C++ dept.

The US National Academy of Engineering has announced that Bjarne Stroustrup will receive the 2018 Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering for his creation of C++ while at Bell Labs. The language C++, to put it mildly, is widely used. The prize will be formally awarded on February 20th in Washington, DC.

Here is Bjarne's home page and his Wikipedia page.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @04:09PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @04:09PM (#617749)

    It's easy to hate Bjarne, which he acknowledges on his website [stroustrup.com]:

    There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses.

    C++ is an amazing achievement.

    It provides dependable, language-level backwards compatibility, and yet is still developing modern capabilities. It has an expressiveness which suits programming from the lowest levels to the highest levels, under multiple paradigms, with as little overhead as possible; "zero-cost abstraction" is one of the fundamental principles that has guided the development of C++. It provides both compile-time and run-time computation, and the programmer's choice of safety constraints.

    Though hundreds or even thousands of people have ultimately contributed to the development of C++ (to say nothing of the wider ecosystem), Bjarne deserves credit for keeping the whole thing going in a meaningful direction, for keeping it practical, and for whipping up the latest fervor of innovation in what may be called the C++ Renaissance. He is definitely one of the Fathers of Computing.

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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday January 04 2018, @04:40PM (1 child)

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday January 04 2018, @04:40PM (#617771) Journal
    C++ is probably the language that I hate the least these days, but a lot of that isn't really due to Bjarne. His original C with classes was a really crappy language that managed to combine the worst bits of C and Simula, without understanding why those ideas in Smalltalk were useful. Templates, which let to the metaprogramming that makes modern C++ so powerful, were added as a hack to work around the limitations of the type system and weren't intended to be as expressive as they were.
    --
    sudo mod me up
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @05:23PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @05:23PM (#617811)

      What's this? Many innovations were stumbled upon by naive adventurers?!

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday January 04 2018, @06:17PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday January 04 2018, @06:17PM (#617852)

    I'll say this much for his efforts: There have been many many attempts to replace C with something with more features. So far, C++ has come the closest to actually succeeding at that, and has significant usage for important-ish software like KDE.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @10:01PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @10:01PM (#617992)

    C++ won because it was the path of least resistance.

    It built on the massive installed base of C programmers and programs, the dominant language of the time. You could migrate your codebase from C to C++ at your own pace.
    It stays with us because the majority of today's high level language programmers work on much higher level languages now, so there isn't much pressure to create a better replacement for a high-performance, high-ish level language like C++. It's a small niche.

    I must say C++ is by far the most complicated programming language I have ever seen. I have no desire to use it.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @02:14AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @02:14AM (#618165)

      But there are many possible ways to add compatible features to C to make this migration path.

      Any of these could have been a path of least resistance.

      Why did C++ win?

      And is there still room for another path from C separate from C++?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @05:48PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @05:48PM (#618413)

        Well, a MAJOR factor in C++ being chosen over its competitors is that it was FREE.
        Free is common now, but it wasn't then.