History of C++ language

In 1979, Bjarne Stroustrup, a Danish scientist, began work on “C with Classes“. The inspiration of creating a new language is originated from Stroustrup’s experience in Programming for his Ph.D. thesis.

In 1982, Stroustrup began to develop a successor to C with Classes, which he named “C++” after going through several other names. He developed a new, standalone compiler for C++.

In 1985, the primary edition of The C++ Programming Language was released, which became the definitive reference for the language, as there was not yet an official standard.

In 1989, C++ 2.0 was released, followed by the second edition of The C++ Programming Language in 1991. In 2.0 some new features are included like inheritance, abstract classes and protected members etc….

In 1990, The Annotated C++ Reference Manual was published. In 1998, C++98 was released, standardizing the language and an update was released in 2003.

As of 2019, C++ is now the fourth most popular programming language, behind C, java, and python.

On January 3, 2018, Stroustrup was announced as the 2018 winner of the Charles Stark Draper Prize for engineering, “for conceptualizing and developing the C++ programming language.”