Quote:a great synopsis of a 40-year success story, from humble beginnings to global adoption to being currently (as of Q3 2025) the fastest-growing of the top four languages in the world… +90% users in the past 3.5 years.
Just released 16 hours ago on YT.
Here's a writeup:
https://herbsutter.com/2026/06/04/c-the-...sed-today/
People who appear in the documentary:
Bjarne Stroustrup: Bell Labs, Designer and original implementer of C++
Alexander Stepanov: Designer of the Standard Template Library
Anders Hejlsberg: Creator of C#, TypeScript, and Turbo Pascal
Andrei Alexandrescu: Principal Research Scientist, Nvidia & C++ Author
Andrew Koenig: Bell Labs, Founding member of the C++ Standards Committee, Researcher, C++ Author & Educator
Barbara Moo: Bell Labs, Manager C++ Development Team & C++ Author
Brian Kernighan: Bell Labs, Computer Scientist, Co-author of “The C Programming Language”
Chris Lattner: Creator of Mojo, LLVM, Clang & Swift
Danilo Piparo: Particle Physicist, CERN, ROOT Framework Project Lead
Eric Lubin: Software Developer – Lead, Hudson River Trading
Gabriel Dos Reis: Software Engineer and Architect, Microsoft; C++ tools builder; Mathematician
Herb Sutter: Technical Fellow, Citadel Securities; Chair, Standard C++ Foundation; Chair Emeritus, ISO C++ Committee
John Romero: Video Game Developer, Co-Creator of Doom and Quake, Co-Founder id Software
Nina Ranns: Vice-Convener of the ISO C++ Committee
Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:50 Invention at AT&T Bell Labs
07:30 C with Classes
09:37 Early adoption of C with Classes
10:53 From C with Classes to C++ (and CFront)
12:32 Why is it called C++?
13:24 AT&T starts selling software / Another team tries to take over C++
16:08 Early development of C++ at AT&T Bell Labs
19:10 “It was a buggy product” / Release 2.0.0
21:55 C++ spreading beyond AT&T
24:50 Too many versions of C++
26:03 Need for standardization
29:38 The STL by Alexander Stepanov
37:19 The first standard: C++98
39:21 C++ at CERN in the 90s
40:34 C++ spreading to games and trading
43:00 C++ winter of the early 2000s
45:34 Programming language wars (C#)
49:25 There’s a need for an efficient programming language again
52:29 Modern C++ (C++11)
56:29 Is the standards committee making C++ too complicated?
1:00:45 C++ is everwhere
01:05:00 The future and challenges for C++
01:08:31 Bjarne’s impact