Bjarne Stroustrup at Google NY, July 31st 2007

Tonight, July 31st of 2007 I had the privilege of attending a talk by the man himself, the creator of the C++ language, Bjarne Stroustrup.

He was sharing with us how things are going for the next version of C++0x – The 0x stands for a possible year of this decade where it will be released.

One of the interesting things that happened to me at this meeting was to finally have the honor of meeting Sebastian Delmont, and oh, those 3 geeky Red Hat guys, wonder if they were actually part of Red Hat or just hardcore fans, good thing I was wearing my Ubuntu shirt to represent for the Ubunteros.

As for C++0x, I guess my thoughts aren’t that deep, I honestly don’t care much about C++ at this point in my life, and it seems it’s an old language striving hard to keep the pace with newer features found in new languages. It seems its very hard to reach consensus on the C++ board, and its very hard to accept new features given the language is already too big, its also funny to see that everything that gets hughe (millions of people use it), will always have problems in terms of adapting to new conditions or injecting innovation to itself. Bjarne created the language around 25 years ago, and there are features that only now he’s finally been able to get accepted for this version. C++ however, we must admit is a language that’s heavily used, (but I think by end users, not the software engineering community), on software like Photoshop, Google search engine, and the Mars rovers (these were the examples Bjarnes kept bringing again and again, I would also be proud of course).

For me, I’ll stick to Python, Nasa’s been using it too for quite a while, the same with Google and many other applications, hey, YouTube’s backend runs in python.