An Evening with Bjarne Stroustrup

We have a very exciting meetup this October: Bjarne Stoustrup, creator of the C++ programming language, will be joining us!

C++ Style – A Touch of Class

We know how to write bad code: Litter our programs with casts, macros, pointers, naked new and deletes, and complicated control structures. Alternatively (or in addition), obscure every design decision in a mess of deeply nested abstractions using the latest object-oriented programming and generic programming tricks. For good measure, complicate our algorithms with interesting special cases. Such code is incomprehensible, unmaintainable, usually inefficient, and not uncommon.

But how do we write good code? What principles, techniques, and idioms can we exploit to make it easier to produce quality code? I will make an argument for type-rich interfaces, compact data structures, integrated resource management and error handling, and highly-structured algorithmic code. I will illustrate my ideas and motivate my guidelines with a few idiomatic code examples.

I will use C++11 freely. Examples include auto, general constant expressions, uniform initialization, type aliases, type safe threading, and user-defined literals. C++ features are only just starting to appear in production compilers, so some of my suggestions have the nature of conjecture. However, developing a “modern style” is essential if we don’t want to maintain newly-written 1970s and 1980s style code in 2020.

This presentation reflects my thoughts on what “Modern C++” should mean in the 2010s: a language for programming based on light-weight abstraction with a direct and efficient mapping to hardware, suitable for infrastructure code.

Please note that due to increased interest in our events, we will be releasing RSVPs in two batches. One for 60 people the week of September 1 and another 60 the week of September 22.

A bit about Bjarne:

I'm a Managing Director in the technology division of Morgan Stanley (http://www.morganstanley.com/) in New York City, a Visiting Professor in Computer Science at Columbia University (http://www.cs.columbia.edu/), and a Distinguished Research Professor in Computer Science at Texas A&M University (http://www.cs.tamu.edu/).

I designed and implemented the C++ programming language (http://www.stroustrup.com/C++.html). To make C++ a stable and up-to-date base for real-world software development, I stuck with its ISO standards effort for 20+ years (so far).