Bjarne Stroustrup Expounds on Concepts and the Future of C++

In his recent article on DevX, Danny Kalev asks Bjarne the hard questions about concepts and C++'s future.

A year ago, everyone was all but certain that the C++0x standard was just around the corner, and that it would include concepts (see Danny Kalev's earlier interview with Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, from August 2008). However, In July 2009 the C++ standards committee decided to remove concepts from the C++0x by an unprecedented move. Danny's recent controversial editorial was among the first to report that decision and its possible consequences. Despite vociferous disagreements over the removal of concepts themselves, nearly everyone agrees that the committee's decision left open many questions not only about concepts, but also about the committee's charter, and even the future of C++ itself.

Therefore, Danny has interviewed Bjarne Stroustrup again, this time to capture his thoughts about concepts, their removal, and the impact of that decision, along with his take on other pressing questions that currently concern the entire C++ community.

Source: DevX: Bjarne Stroustrup Expounds on Concepts and the Future of C++

Book Signing and Reception for Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup

by Tony Okonski

Please join us for a book signing and reception honoring Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup on the release of his new book, Programming Principles and Practice Using C++. The reception will be held from 3-5pm on Friday, February 20, 2009 at the J. Wayne Stark Galleries on the campus of Texas A&M University.

Programming Principles and Practice Using C++ was written for those who have never programmed, and it has been tested with more than 1,000 first-year students at Texas A&M University. It is the current textbook for the ENGR 112, Foundations of Engineering 2, and CPSC 113 Intermediate Programming and Design courses; however, practitioners and advanced students will gain new insight and guidance by seeing how a recognized master approaches the elements of his art.

This book was written primarily to teach the fundamentals, concepts, and techniques of programming in greater depth as compared to traditional introductions. This approach creates a solid foundation for writing useful, correct, maintainable, and efficient code. The book also serves as a general introduction to programming, covering both object-oriented programming and generic programming. It is a solid introduction to the C++ programming language, one of the most widely used languages for real-world software. The book presents modern C++ programming techniques from the start, introducing the C++ standard library to simplify programming tasks.

The book covers a wide range of essential concepts, from design and programming techniques, language features, and libraries, including input, output, computation, and simple graphics, to more specialized topics, such as text processing and testing, and provides abundant reference material. Source code and support supplements are available from the author's website. Some comments from readers:

"A remarkable balance of accessibility and accuracy."

"Up until now, I looked in vain for one that combines a good explanation of programming principles with a good explanation of C++."

"The sheer joy that shines throughout the pages. It's clear that Bjarne Stroustrup is still jazzed about programming after all this time."


Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup is the designer and original implementer of C++ and the author of The C++ Programming Language. He is the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science and Professor at Texas A&M University, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and an AT&T Fellow. He is a founding member of the ISO C++ standards committee.

Source: Department of Computer Science at Texas A&M University

Bjarne Stroustrup on Educating Software Developers

In this interview Dr. Stroustrup speaks about the challenges and problems – and improvements being made – in computer science programs. Among issues like perceptions of offshoring and the need to balance the theoretical with the practical, he addresses complaints by tech companies about the lack of fully qualified CS graduates.

Source: Datamation

The A-Z of Programming Languages: C++

by Naomi Hamilton

Bjarne Stroustrup, the creative force behind one of the most widely used and successful programming languages — C++ — is featured in an in-depth 8-page interview where he reveals everything programmers and software engineers should know about C++; its history, what it was intended to do, where it is at now, and of course what all good code-writers should think about when using the language he created.

Bjarne Stroustrup on the Evolution of Languages

by Howard Dierking

Every once in a while, an evolutionary leap rapidly advances and reshapes the entire field of engineering. Such a leap occurred in software development with the introduction of the C++ programming language. This leap was not inherent in the language itself: object-oriented languages such as Simula67 and Smalltalk existed prior to C++. But because C++ was built on top of the C programming language (and could compile existing C programs), it was able to bring the abstractions of object-oriented thinking into the mainstream.
C++ has inspired a great deal of thought surrounding software design and development, from design patterns to meta-programming. And because of its portability among hardware platforms and its lower-level expressiveness, C++ will assuredly be essential in a world of faster, smaller hardware.
I recently had the pleasure of talking to Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, about a host of topics, from his thoughts on languages to general industry trends to his own personal reading list. Many of the questions asked were suggested by readers via my blog, so thanks to everyone who contributed questions. And of course, thanks to Bjarne. Continue to the interview ...

An Interview with Bjarne Stroustrup

by James Buchanan

C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup discusses the evolving C++0x standard, the education of programmers, and the future of programming.

http://www.ddj.com/cpp/207000124

Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award

Santa Clara, Calif. - Best-selling author Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++ and author of the Addison-Wesley title The C++ Programming Language, has received the Dr. Dobb's Journal Excellence in Programming Award.

The Dr. Dobb's Journal Excellence in Programming Award is annually bestowed on individuals who, in the spirit of innovation and cooperation, have made significant contributions to the advancement of software development. Stroustrup's award acknowledges significant achievements in object-oriented programming, software architecture and modeling.

"I'm especially pleased to receive this award because it reflects the views of real-world software developers and shows that with persistence and a bit of luck an individual can still make a difference", Stroustrup said. This award has been bestowed on few of the industry elite, including Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the LINUX operating system, Guido van Rossum, the Python programming language creator, and Larry Wall, author of the Perl programming language.

In addition to the The C++ Programming Language, now in its third edition, Stroustrup is the author of The Design and Evolution of C++, The Annotated C++ Reference Manual, and the forthcoming Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++, to be published in August.

Bjarne Stroustrup is the designer and original implementer of C++ and the author of The C++ Programming Language and The Design and Evolution of C++ from Addison-Wesley. His research interests include distributed systems, simulation, design, programming techniques, software development tools and programming languages. Stroustrup is the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science at Texas A&M University and an AT&T Fellow. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an AT&T Bell Laboratories Fellow, an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Fellow. He is actively involved in the ANSI/ISO standardization of C++.

This article was written by Andrea Bledsoe for Engineering Weekly; with contributions by Tony Okonski

C++ Chronicles

Nostalgic recollections of some early days of C++ :-)

Open Multi-Methods for C++

We've recently got our paper on multi-methods accepted to GPCE'07 and Peter will do a dry run of the presentation on Tuesday, September 25, 2007 at 16:00 in HRBB 302. Please stop by and give us your feedback. Thanks!

Abstract

Multiple dispatch -- the selection of a function to be invoked based on the
dynamic type of two or more arguments -- is a solution to several classical
problems in object-oriented programming. Open multi-methods generalize multiple dispatch towards open-class extensions, which improve separation of concerns and provisions for retroactive design. We present the rationale, design, implementation, and performance of a language feature, called open multi-methods, for C++. Our open multi-methods support both repeated and virtual inheritance. Our call resolution rules generalize both virtual function dispatch and overload resolution semantics. After using all information from argument types, these rules can resolve further ambiguities by using covariant return types. Great care was taken to integrate open multi-methods with existing C++ language features and rules. We describe a model
implementation and compare its performance and space requirements to existing open multi-method extensions and workaround techniques for C++. Compared to these techniques, our approach is simpler to use, catches more user mistakes, and resolves more ambiguities through link-time analysis, runs significantly faster, and requires less memory.

In particular, the runtime cost of calling an open multimethod is constant and
less than the cost of a double dispatch (two virtual function calls). Finally,
we provide a sketch of a design for open multi-methods in the presence of
dynamic loading and linking of libraries.

Technical report on this work can be found here

More information about Peter Pirkelbauer can be found on his webpage.

The Future of C++

by Bjarne Stroustrup

In a rare public talk, C++ creator Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup discusses his ideal in programming languages, as well how he sees the next version (and beyond) of C++ developing. He explains the general selection criteria used for adding new features, some of the legacy of C++, and many other interesting topics. Especially interesting is during the Q&A he explains his views of the embrace and extend mentality some implementations, such as VC++, have taken.

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Source: University of Waterloo