The birth of C++

In the coming two years after C was released, the code written in C began to suffer from a problem. As the programmers harnessed the power of Personal Computer, the software grew more complex, and the C programs have gotten longer and longer. This meant that these programs were also harder to maintain. Some functions needed to communicate with other functions, but there was no standard way of thinking about data organization. In long programs, the code was practically infested with functions in the global scope. One of the few ways to separate data was by using separate C header (.h) and C source (.c) files. Other than that, the language's features that would help organize the code to ensure readability of large programs were simply missing.

There had to be a solution. In 1983, Bjarne Stroustrup developed such a solution, and named it the C++ programming language. He drew inspiration from some of the previous languages that allowed object-oriented programming. One of those languages was Simula67. It can be said that one of the greatest addition to C's supset, the C++ language, was that C++ introduced programmers to the concept of an object. An object is an abstraction of a problem. Not only does the use of the concept of objects in a programming language reduce the size of the program, it also makes the program much more readable and compact. The notion of objects gave the origin to the concept of Object-Oriented programming which I discuss in my Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming.