A Brief History of Bjarne Stroustrup, the Creator of C++

Welcome to Aarhus, the second biggest city in  the Kingdom of Denmark. With a population of   just over 370,000 people, Aarhus is known for  its amusement park, modern arts museum, BMOs,   and for being the birthplace of Danish computer  scientist "Bjarn Strauss". Bjarne Stroustrup. Yes,   Bjarne Stroustrup. English speakers and foreigners  in general have some trouble pronouncing it.   It's Bjarne Stroustrup. Try it a few times, then  stick a potato down your throat and do it again,   and then it'll sound about right,  the way a Dane would do it. Okay?! Bjarne was born in 1950. This is where I grew  up. This is the yard, right up there was where   my parents and I lived. This is the school  where I went from first to 9th grade. This   is sort of a lot of Aarhus right behind me. He  was born on the day before New Year's eve. Jaaa,   det er jo ikke en god dag at have fødselsdag på.  I can't recommend this as a birthday. Does Bjarne   believe in astrology you might ask? No. Well,  he's a Capricorn which has the following traits:   ambitious, disciplined and hardworking.  More or less, more or less. In 1969,   Bjarne went to university. This is the main part  of University of Aarhus where I was a student,   got my masters here. And who would have thought?  He actually got into programming by mistake. I   picked a kind of math I thought was applied  and you could build something with it. And in   Danish that was mathematics with datology and I  didn't actually know that datology was computer   science so I signed up to become a computer  scientist without actually knowing it and   uh well it worked out. But what if it hadn't?  I'm not good at anticipating failure, I just work   harder. During his time at Aarhus University, he  met a person who would prove important to his and   well our future. Oh, you mean Kristen, Kristen  Nygaard? Yes! Kristen Nygaard, the inventor of   Simula and object-oriented programming. His  ideas of how to structure code was very, very   good and inspiring. With Simula, I could write  code easier and have it more correct. That kept   me going. Still keeps me going. In 1975, Bjarne  left Aarhus for Cambridge where he completed a   PhD under the legendary David Wheeler. After that,  he made the big move to the US where he started   working at the world renowned Bell Labs alongside  famous programming pioneers like Brian Kernighan,   Dennis Ritchie, Al Aho, Bob Morris, were probably  the key people there. There was many more,   but I'm lousy with names. At some point, Bjarne  knew 24 programming languages. Algol, Snobol,   a pattern matching language. Algol 68, PL1, PL  360, Mesa. There's just a lot of languages. You   might be wondering how this is even possible. It  was much easier to learn languages in those days   because they didn't come with all of that baggage  and tool support and such. Anybody who came and   told you that they had learned 24 languages  today, that would be fraud, you can't do that.   Things are more complicated these days. It was  at Bell Labs that Bjarne started work on C++. I   was always thinking about operating systems and  machine architectures. I was trying to work on   high level support and I just needed a language.  So I decided to build one. At first he named it C   with classes because... because it was - it was  C and I had put Simula style classes into it.   Later, C with classes turned into C++ because I  thought it was cute and unusual and still people   think it's too unusual and you couldn't do that  but I liked it. It wasn't me who thought of it but   I picked it off a list. I wish I had that list but  I've lost it. And then, C++ took off. We saw the   use of C++ going up like that. Starting with one  user that wasn't me after 6 months. Well, 10 years   later and it had close to a million. Bjarne had a  special philosophy for the language. At the time,   I was saying that I need to build a weed, not  a rose, because I can't be around to water it   all the time. And he's especially proud of one  thing: there was no advertising campaign. No,   no, no sugar daddy trying to push  this out in the world. It just spread. Did Bjarne ever imagine that C++ would grow  into one of the most influential languages   in the world? If somebody had told me there  would be 7 million users, engineers and such,   I wouldn't have believed them. I was just building  something for myself and my local group of friends   and colleagues and then it just spread. Well, we  thank you for it, Bjarne. From operating systems   to space exploration, C++ has been there.  And to this day, Bjarne is still teaching,   speaking, and writing code. I keep going  because of two things. One, it's fun to see   how it's used and there's nice people to talk  to and secondly a feeling of obligation that   somebody has to make it better to keep up to date.  And through it all, Bjarne Stroustrup and his   signature hair. It's just the way the hair grows  and when it gets too long, it gets cut. That's   about it. And that's always been the way it is.  I'm not very fashion conscious. So there we have   it! A brief history of the great Danish computer  scientist Bjarne Stroustrup. Bjarne Stroustrup. [music]