Notes From The Oral History Of Bjarne Stroustrup
The aim of this page📝 is to share notes from a wonderful oral history interview with the author of the c++ language Bjarne Stroustrup.
There are a lot of people who come with the firm idea they want to build a new language or they want to build a new game or they want to build a new operating system, and what islacking in most cases is an understanding of what’s the problem. That is, C++ succeeded not so muchbecause I made a beautiful design but because I was really lucky of having identified a problem that a lotof people were about to get, namely handling complexity with larger memories and faster processors
I think that students are by and large ahistorical. They have not been taught history, they don’t understand history, and they think that history has nothing to teach them. Everything was invented yesterday, and everything is the latest fad. I think that that is mostunfortunate, and I think the schools are encouraging this.
1. notes
- 0:0 background in Denmark
- 0:5 no mentors at University, luck as a factor for choosing major
- 0:11 formative experience in understanding the need for idioms when learning a language
- 0:13 consultant experience with direct negotiation with clients and their children
- 0:17 PhD in Cambridge experience
- 0:23 Cambridge and Bell Labs as unique environments in raising self-expectations teaching to think big
- 0:25 distributed computing as dissertation subject with network simulation picking up Simula67
- 0:31 it is incestuous if teachers the previous job is a student; on seeking practical experience after graduation ending up in bell labs for the next 16 years
- 0:35 bell labs, UNIX is born there, C is born there. UNIX-based system from his dissertations on distributed computing. kernel-separation into modules. mistake: C did not have the ability to divide what is shared and what is not. too low-level
- 0:38 simula67 taught from author and C taught from author and combination — manipulate hardware directly, work with higher-level concepts as well
- 0:47 1984–1985, with users comes responsibility — the first expansion of “c with classes” renamed to “C++”
- 1:3 on performance as the factor for some domains where c++ or FORTRAN are suitable — which is not everywhere like mobile
- 1:6 on ANSI/ISO standardization of c++ as a prereq for major industrial use and a major pain of the neck
- 1:18 1994, on STL and Alex Stepanov and pushing it through the committee
- 1:20 aspects of functional programming
- 1:30 hubl3 paper with expressive power, ability to deal of hardware, a tenth of the size without the loss of performance — on the minimized idea of c++
- 1:34 on leaving ATT and Bell Labs into academia for a decade and into enterprise
