I just finished watching CultRepo’s brilliant new documentary, The Story of C++: The World’s Most Consequential Programming Language, and it sparked a lot of nostalgia.
Looking back, I sometimes wish I had dove deeper into the C/C++ ecosystem early on. My own journey started with BASIC on the Commodore 64, but my career path ultimately deployed me straight into the infosec and sysadmin world. In that sector of the sandbox, tools like TCL/TK, Perl, Python, and Java became my primary operational assets.
Yet, even from the systems and security side, you can’t escape the sheer gravity of C and C++. It was always a massive part of everything around me, especially when dealing with kernel development, RTOS work, and low-level hardware interfaces.
A few key takeaways from the documentary:
- The Foundation of Modern Infrastructure: Bjarne Stroustrup’s original vision at Bell Labs, which combined the raw hardware efficiency of C with the abstraction power of Simula, built the literal bedrock of modern computing.
- The “Invisible” Engine: From operating systems and browsers to high-frequency trading platforms and game engines like Unreal, C++ delivers the performance-per-watt that demanding systems require. Even modern Python-driven AI pipelines rely on highly optimised C++ libraries underneath.
- Evolution Under Fire: The film does an excellent job detailing the language’s timeline, from the early “C with Classes” pre-processor days to the intense standardization battles, the “C++ Winter” of the early 2000s, and its massive renaissance starting with C++11.
Whether you write handwritten assembly or high-level script, this documentary is a fantastic reconnaissance mission into a critical period of computing history. The engineering choices made over forty years ago still underlie the vast majority of our digital infrastructure today.
Highly recommended watch for anyone interested in the technical architecture of our world.
You can watch the full documentary on YouTube: The Story of C++