Bjarne Stroustrup is the creator of C and a former researcher at Bell Labs at its peak. I interviewed him about:
• What made Bell Labs different
• Programming language design: types, memory safety, bootstrapping
• When abstraction improves performance
• Anecdotes from building C
• Thoughts on AI writing C
• Mistakes he'd change while building C
Where to watch:
• YouTube:
youtu.be/U46fJ2bJ-co
• Spotify:
open.spotify.com/episode/52p…
• Apple Podcasts:
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
• Transcript:
developing.dev/p/creator-of-…
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Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro
0:50 - The origin of C
8:46 - What Bell Labs was like
17:24 - Dennis Ritchie
24:00 - When to build a programming language
31:59 - Bootstrapping a language
33:58 - C is not object-oriented
37:32 - Discussing type systems
46:20 - Memory safety
49:26 - Standards committee anecdotes
1:09:40 - Adding automatic garbage collection to C
1:18:25 - Template instantiation is Turing complete
1:21:57 - Abstraction and performance
1:28:51 - AI writing code
1:35:54 - His motivation
1:39:18 - Famous quotes
1:46:48 - Reflecting on building C
1:49:12 - Top C book recommendation
1:50:59 - Advice for his younger self
1:58:06 - Outro