Communications of the ACM
Computer Science Pioneer Bjarne Stroustrup to Receive the 2018 Charles Stark Draper Prize For Engineering
The National Academy of Engineering will award its 2018 Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering to Morgan Stanley technology division managing director Bjarne Stroustrup "for conceptualizing and developing the C++ programming language."
Credit: National Academy of Engineering
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) announced that the 2018 Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering will be awarded to Bjarne Stroustrup "for conceptualizing and developing the C++ programming language." The $500,000 annual award is given to engineers whose accomplishments have significantly benefited society.
The Draper Prize will be presented at a gala dinner event in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2018.
"Bjarne Stroustrup's creation of the C++ programming language has had a monumental, singular influence on the field of computing," said NAE President C. D. Mote, Jr. "I am honored to bestow upon Bjarne Stroustrup this year's Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering for C++. His creation reminds our society of the extraordinary impact that an outstanding engineer can have on our world."
Though invisible to the general public, billions of people indirectly use C++ every day. Pervasive in computerized systems everywhere, the Google search engine is written in C++, as is most of Google's supporting infrastructure. The communications parts of smartphones are in C++ as well as much of the telecommunication systems that connect them. C++ is key to many of tools of the movie industry and the higher levels of the Mars Rover software. C++ libraries underlie the current efforts in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and autonomous vehicles.
Indeed, C++ is one of computing's most influential programming languages. At Bell Labs, Stroustrup developed it in response to the dual challenges of achieving optimal performance and handling complexity for distributed systems. The C++ programming language is based on the C programming language, adding powerful abstraction mechanisms without compromising C's ability to effectively use hardware resources. C++'s combination of expressiveness and efficiency surpasses that of other programming languages, making it a popular choice for complex tasks with resource constraints such as game engines, database implementations, control systems, financial services, graphics, networking, and web servers. C++ is now used by approximately 4.5 million programmers around the world and has revolutionized numerous applications—from web services like Google and Facebook to medical systems such as CAT scanners and blood analyses.
From National Academy of Engineering
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