I met some ambassadors from Morgan Stanley who were wearing a shirt which had a list of check boxes that went something like this:<p>[ ] Had a holiday recently<p>[ ] ???<p>[x] Met inventor of C++
He is also a visiting professor at Columbia's computer science department and mentioned that a big reason for coming to New York was really to be close to his grand kids. I am currently in a course on C++ language library design at Columbia with him - and I can comfortably say that he's one of the most humble and down-to-earth professors in the department (IMHO).<p>His class is awesome for not only hearing his stories like why it's called C++ instead of ++C, but learning about all the little details in C++ today and what's to come for C++17 and on. If anyone has any questions they want me to ask him, I'd be happy to do so.
Ok, is it just me that thought it telling that all the folks in the carousel at the bottom of the page are wearing suits (and ties for the men) but Bjarne has a open necked shirt on?<p>That said, I really resonate with this statement of his: <i>"I wanted to get back to solving real-world problems."</i><p>I tend to be most motivated when I've got a problem to solve which can be expressed in terms of real world gains (usually in efficiency). Interesting to hear that he didn't think he could do that in academia.
> Come on, now. How about Google? NASA? Tesla? Plenty of real world problems to solve there tackling difficult problems.<p>Well, as a professor, he did get some code into some JPL projects ( <a href="http://stroustrup.com/mbd09.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://stroustrup.com/mbd09.pdf</a> , <a href="http://stroustrup.com/sec09.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://stroustrup.com/sec09.pdf</a> , <a href="http://stroustrup.com/autonomics09.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://stroustrup.com/autonomics09.pdf</a> , <a href="http://stroustrup.com/fdc_jcse.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://stroustrup.com/fdc_jcse.pdf</a> , <a href="http://stroustrup.com/autonomics2008.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://stroustrup.com/autonomics2008.pdf</a> and <a href="http://stroustrup.com/isorc2008.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://stroustrup.com/isorc2008.pdf</a> ). (<i>Some</i> information about MDS and goal oriented software can be found on JPL's website, <a href="http://mds.jpl.nasa.gov/public/" rel="nofollow">http://mds.jpl.nasa.gov/public/</a> ).
> What motivated you to leave academia to join Morgan Stanley?<p>$$$<p>Don't get me wrong, nothing wrong with that, he's earned it. But the whole spiel about wanting to get back to solving real world problems... Come on, now. How about Google? NASA? Tesla? Plenty of real world problems to solve there tackling difficult problems.<p>But Morgan Stanley? Decade old technology spending most of your time interfacing twenty year old languages to mainframes. Nothing that will make your heart pound there.<p>But the money... oh yeah, the money. No argument there.
Thought it would be cool to check out what some of the other language inventors were/are doing:<p>Guido van Rossum (Python) - Google, Dropbox<p>Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP) - WePay, Etsy, Jelastic<p>Yukihiro Matsumoto (Ruby) - Heroku
What would he _do_ there in that capacity? I think of him as a technically brilliant engineer -- a "Managing Director, Morgan Stanley" and Bjarne Stroustrup just don't sound compatible (to me) on the surface... at least he's getting paid, though.
OP here. My original title was "The Inventor of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup Works at Morgan Stanley", and after 20 minutes, it somehow changed "Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology". WHAT'S GOING ON HERE?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!