C++ got its name from a programmer's joke about adding one to C
In C, writing ++ after a variable bumps its value up by one. In 1983 Rick Mascitti suggested borrowing that operator to name Bjarne Stroustrup's upgraded C, and later admitted it was meant tongue in cheek. The joke stuck to a language that went on to help build Microsoft Windows, video games and space probes.
Stroustrup, a Danish computer scientist at Bell Labs, began in 1979 with something he called C with Classes, bolting classes, inheritance, stronger typing and default arguments onto C. From 1982 he redesigned it more thoroughly. Briefly called C84 and sometimes new C, it gained virtual functions, operator overloading, references, const and the double-slash comment. He also wrote Cfront, the compiler front end that translated it.
There was no official standard for years, so Stroustrup's book The C++ Programming Language, first published in 1985, served as the rulebook; the first commercial compiler shipped that October. Version 2.0 in 1989 added multiple inheritance and abstract classes, and later came templates, exceptions and namespaces. ISO finally standardised the language in 1998. Progress then slowed until C++11 brought a burst of new features, followed by regular updates up to the version ISO published in October 2024.
Its guiding rules explain both its power and its reputation. Features must solve real problems and be implementable. Programmers pick their own style. Types defined by users should perform as well as built-in ones, and features nobody uses must not slow the finished program. Crucially, allowing a useful feature matters more than preventing every misuse. That freedom includes managing memory by hand, which is why careless code can open security holes such as buffer overflows, and why Stroustrup urged the community to defend the language in March 2025.
It remains near the top of the TIOBE popularity index, passing Java for the first time in December 2022 and sitting second behind Python by November 2024. In 2018 Stroustrup received the Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering for creating it.
Source: C++
