Stroustrup and Sutter: C++ to run and run | Reg Developer

This is the conference (and super session) I attended last week. It was really cool. =)

Stroustrup and Sutter: C++ to run and run | Reg Developer

SD West 2008 For the second year in a row organizers at the Software Development Conference & Expo West felt the super sessions hosted by C++ legends Bjarne Stroustrup and Herb Sutter were worth some ink on the event agenda.

“There was a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s when they simply stopped advertising C++ sessions at this conference,” Sutter told attendees. “And yet they found a curious thing: every year for four years, C++ was the strongest track at the show. With zero advertising! That says something about the market. That says that there are problems that C++ is solving.”

The duo offered the C++ crowd day-long sessions at SD West. In fact, a session presented last year (Concepts and generic programming in C++0x”) was back by popular demand, alongside an additional day of new material covering the design and evolution of the grandpappy of object-oriented programming languages.

Sutter is the author of several books on software development, a lead architect at Microsoft, chair of the ISO C++ standards committee, and coiner of the phrase “concurrency revolution.” Stroustrup is also an author, a professor of computer science at the Texas A&M University’s college of engineering, and a research fellow at AT&T Labs.

Of course, the Danish computer scientist is best known as the creator and original implementer of C++.

Stroustrup doesn’t like to hear his brainchild referred to as an object-oriented programming (OOP) language, though he allowed that its main contribution was to make OOP mainstream. “Before C++, 99.9 per cent of programmers never even heard of it OOP,” he said during a post-session Q&A. “Those who’d heard of it believed that it was only for slow graphics written by geniuses.”