Bjarne Stroustrup is a professor in the college of computer engineering at Texas A&M University. He is a member of many organizations such as the Institute of Electronics and Engineers, Association for Computing Machinery, and an AT&T Labs research member. Among his many organizations Stroustrup's greatest accomplishment is the development of the object-oriented programming language C++.
Bjarne was born in Aarhus Denmark in 1950. He attended school at the University of Aarhus where he received his Candidatus Scientiarum (the equivalent of a master's degree). He achieved his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1979 with work on the design of distributed systems. He came to the United States in 1979 to join the Computer Science Research Center of Bell Telephone Laboratories. In 1983 thru 1985 while working at Bell Labs he designed and implemented the C++ language.
C++ is an extension of the previous C programming language written by Dennis Richie. It was originally intended and designed for the UNIX system environment, but has since crossed platforms to the more GUI operating systems used by Windows and Macintosh. C++ combines the uses of classes (previously used by another programming language Simula) with the object-oriented C. The two languages put together created a powerful and precise language that is now the most widely used object-oriented programming language.
Stroustrup has written and published more than a hundred popular and academic papers. In addition he has also published five books, the most popular being "The C++ Programming Language" in 1985. The second addition came out in 1991, the third in 1997, and a "special" edition was published in 2000. His books are the most widely read of their kind and have been translated into 18 different languages around the world. Bjarne has received many awards and acknowledgments throughout his life and career. In 1990, his paper "The Annotated C++ Reference Manual" was given the Dr.