History of C++

In 1979, Bjarne Stroustrup, a Danish computer scientist, began work on "C with Classes," the predecessor to C++. The motivation for creating a new language stemmed from Stroustrup's experience in programming for his PhD thesis. He found that Simula, a programming language, had features beneficial for large software development but was too slow for practical use, while BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) was fast but too low-level for large software development.

When Stroustrup started working at AT&T Bell Labs, he faced the challenge of analyzing the UNIX kernel with respect to distributed computing. Recalling his PhD experience, Stroustrup decided to enhance the C language with Simula-like features. C was chosen because it was general-purpose, fast, portable, and widely used.

In the modern world, there are numerous new languages like Python and many more, but their interpretation is still not as efficient in some contexts. Eigen is a C++ library that integrates with Python and is widely used in machine learning.

This highlights that C++ remains at the core of the software development process, providing essential performance and functionality that continue to be highly relevant today.