Bjarne Stroustrup
Bjarne Stroustrup
Bjarne Stroustrup (born 30 December 1950) is a Danish computer scientist best known as the creator and principal designer of the C++ programming language. His work has had a lasting influence on systems programming, game development, and large‐scale software engineering.
Stroustrup earned a master’s degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Aarhus (1975) and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Cambridge (1979) under the supervision of David Wheeler. He then worked at Bell Labs (now Nokia Bell Labs) from 1979 to 2002, where he began developing "C with Classes" – the precursor to C++ – in 1979. The language was officially named C++ in 1983. Stroustrup also authored the definitive textbook The C++ Programming Language, first published in 1985, which remains a standard reference for the language.
After Bell Labs, Stroustrup held academic positions at Texas A&M University (2002–2014) and served as a managing director in the technology division of Morgan Stanley (2014–2022). As of 2025 he is a visiting professor at Columbia University and continues to be active in the evolution of C++ through the ISO C++ standards committee.
Contributions
Stroustrup’s primary contribution is the design and implementation of C++, which extended the C (programming language) with object-oriented programming, generic programming, and low-level memory manipulation. He has also written extensively on software design, performance, and the philosophy of programming, notably in his books The Design and Evolution of C++ and Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++.
He has received numerous awards, including the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award (1993), the IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award (2018), and election to the National Academy of Engineering (2004).
Personal life
Stroustrup was born in Aarhus, Denmark. He is married and has two children.