Anyone who is a serious computer programmer, would recognize Bjarne Stroustrup as a leader in his field. He invented the programming language C++ and wrote three books about it, including one that is in its fourth edition and has been translated into 19 languages.

Stroustrup, holder of the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science at Texas A&M, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and winner of the Sigma Xi William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement. Now he is sharing his passion for computer programming with freshman computer science students in a course he developed just for them.

I decided to design a first programming course after seeing how many computer science students—including students from top schools—lacked fundamental skills needed to design and implement quality software," Stroustrup says. "Many simply had a completely warped view of what software development was about. They saw software development as 'just programming,' and a programmer as an obsessed individual working in isolation, slaving away night after night on obscure details of incomprehensible code. Some like that picture, but most don't find it attractive. I don't find it attractive. This warped view causes some people to avoid computer science completely," he says.

When Stroustrup was a beginner himself, he was "an impatient novice who just wanted to get his job done." Programming was what he did to get the job done—until he became fascinated by it.

"That's a significant shift in emphasis," he says. "I suppose it's similar to the transition from enjoying reading a novel, to wondering about why the novel is enjoyable, to studying how the author made the subject interesting, and, finally, to becoming an author yourself."

C++ is a programming language that supports techniques like object-oriented programming: Its commands initiate operations in discrete modules, or objects, in a program. Software like the Apple iPod user interface, Adobe Photoshop, the Mars Exploration Rovers' visual systems and Microsoft Internet Explorer are programmed in it. And an update, C++0X, is in the works and expected to be formally approved by 2009.

Stroustrup says C++0X will simplify the programming language—and programming overall—for beginners, while also providing plenty of new features for the experts.

"You have to consider how easy an individual feature is to use, how it will be used in the context of a real program, how easy it is to learn and how well it supports programming techniques," Stroustrup says. "In addition, you have to consider how those techniques, as initially learned by novices, scale to real-world problems and how learning the feature and its related techniques lead to further effective learning that will influence our world for the better."

Photo courtesy of Scott Goldsmith

For more information, visit Texas A&M University on the Web at www.tamu.edu and itunes.tamu.edu.

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