He works on distributed systems, data mining, programming languages, and software development tools. Before Google, Rob was a member of the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, the lab that developed Unix. While there, he worked on computer graphics, user interfaces, languages, concurrent programming, and distributed systems. He was an architect of the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems and is the co-author with Brian Kernighan of The Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming.

• Google’s Go: A New Programming Language That’s Python Meets C++
• Google hopes to remake programming with Go

Mr. Stroustrup presented C++Ox at Google in New York. Interestingly he covered features he tried to introduce 25 years ago that are just now being implemented. It gave me a sense of scope.

He provided insight to the balance needed when choosing the enhancements to introduce into a language as old and widespread as C++.

A new feature might improve the lives of 200 thousand coders but that is just 6% of the 3 million developers in the community. Language bloat, increased complexity, performance and much more need to be considered.

Adding garbage collection is debated as both good and evil.

Today it is rare to hear Borland, Sun and Microsoft spoken in a single sentence. Mr. Stroustrup does in the context of each C++ compiler implementation. He continued with the impact this has had on development to this day. That gave me another moment of pause.

To top it off, the deciding and implementation of language additions are done by committee, voting and volunteer time.

A tip of the hat to Mr. Stroustrup for stamina.

Here is the link to the Standards Committee work on C++Ox.