Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of the C++ programming language Credit: Brent Humphreys

In the 1980s and '90s, when he was a researcher at AT&T Bell Labs, the Danish-born computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup designed C++, arguably the most influential programming language of the last 25 years. For all that, C++ is controversial. The language is widely disliked by the millions of programmers who use it, largely because it is notoriously difficult to learn and use, and because Stroustrup's design permits them to make serious programming mistakes in the interests of maximizing their freedom of expression. Today, ­Stroustrup is a professor of computer science at Texas A&M University.

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