II · Languages & runtimes
Bjarne Stroustrup
1950–
Morgan Stanley · ex-Bell Labs · creator of C++
Gave us
C++. Generic programming. RAII (resource acquisition is initialisation). The argument that abstractions can be zero-cost.
The story
Designed C++ in 1979 because Simula was too slow and BCPL too low-level. Forty-five years later, the language still ships in every browser engine, game engine, and database.