Chapter 2. The Origin Story
This may be old news to some readers, and is admittedly a C++-centric telling, but we want to provide a sketch of the history of C++ in order to put its recent resurgence in perspective.
The first programming languages, such as Fortran and Cobol, were developed to allow a domain specialist to write portable programs without needing to know the arcane details of specific machines.
But systems programmers were expected to master such details of computer hardware, so they wrote in assembly language. This gave programmers ultimate power and performance at the cost of portability and tedious detail. But these were accepted as the price one paid for doing systems programming.
The thinking was that you either were a domain specialist, and therefore wanted or needed to have low-level details abstracted from you, or you were a systems programmer and wanted and needed to be exposed to all those details. The systems-programming world was ripe for a language that allowed to you ignore those details except when access to them was important.
C: Portable Assembler
In the early 1970s, Dennis Ritchie introduced “C,”1 a programming language that did for systems programmers what earlier high-level languages had done for domain specialists. It turns out that systems programmers also want to be free of the mind-numbing detail and lack of portability inherent in assembly-language programming, but they still required a language that gave them complete control of the ...
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