Alexander Stepanov
{{short description|Russian-American computer programmer (born 1950)}}
{{other people}}
Alexander Alexandrovich Stepanov ({{langx|ru|Алекса́ндр Алекса́ндрович Степа́нов}}; born November 16, 1950, Moscow) is a Russian-American computer programmer, best known as an advocate of generic programming and as the primary designer and implementer of the C++ Standard Template Library,{{cite web|first=Alexander| last=Stepanov| author-link=Alexander Stepanov|author2=Lee, Meng| url=http://www.stepanovpapers.com| title=The Standard Template Library| publisher=HP Laboratories Technical Report 95-11(R.1)| date=1995-11-14}} which he started to develop around 1992 while employed at HP Labs. He had earlier been working for Bell Labs close to Andrew Koenig and tried to convince Bjarne Stroustrup to introduce something like Ada generics in C++.{{cite book|chapter-url=https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1238844.1238848 |last1=Stroustrup |first1=Bjarne |title=Proceedings of the third ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages |chapter=Evolving a language in and for the real world |date=2007-06-09|pages=4-1–4-59|isbn=978-1-59593-766-7|s2cid=7518369 |doi=10.1145/1238844.1238848}} He is credited with the notion of concept.[https://isocpp.org/blog/2016/02/a-bit-of-background-for-concepts-and-cpp17-bjarne-stroustrup a bit of background for concepts and C++17—Bjarne Stroustrup], by Bjarne Stroustrup | Feb 26, 2016[https://isocpp.org/blog/2016/01/alex-stepanov Alex Stepanov], by Bjarne Stroustrup | Jan 21, 2016
He is the author (with Paul McJones) of [http://www.elementsofprogramming.com/ Elements of Programming],{{cite book|first=Alexander| last=Stepanov| author-link=Alexander Stepanov|author2=McJones, Paul|title=Elements of Programming |publisher=Addison-Wesley |year=2009 |isbn=978-0-321-63537-2}} a book that grew out of a "Foundations of Programming" course{{cite book |first=Alexander| last=Stepanov| author-link=Alexander Stepanov| title=Notes on Programming| url=http://www.stepanovpapers.com/notes.pdf | year=2007}} that Stepanov taught at Adobe Systems (while employed there). He is also the author (with Daniel E. Rose) of [http://fm2gp.com From Mathematics to Generic Programming].{{cite book|first=Alexander A.| last=Stepanov| author-link=Alexander Stepanov|author2=Rose, Daniel E.|title=From Mathematics to Generic Programming | publisher=Addison-Wesley | year=2015 | isbn=978-0321942043}}
He retired in January 2016 from A9.com.[https://isocpp.org/blog/2016/01/alex-stepanov Alex Retirement], Jan 14, 2016
Standard Template Library and generic programming
Alexander Stepanov is an advocate of generic programming. Although David Musser had already developed and advocated some aspects of generic programming by 1971, it was limited to a rather specialized area of software development (computer algebra).
Stepanov recognized the full potential for generic programming and persuaded his then-colleagues at General Electric Research and Development (including, primarily, David Musser and Deepak Kapur) that generic programming should be pursued as a comprehensive basis for software development. At the time there was no real support in any programming language for generic programming.
The first major language to provide such support was Ada, with its generic units feature. By 1987 Stepanov and Musser had developed and published an Ada library for list processing that embodied the results of much of their research on generic programming. However, Ada had not achieved much acceptance outside the defense industry and C++ seemed more likely to become widely used and provide good support for generic programming even though the language was relatively immature. Another reason for turning to C++, which Stepanov recognized early on, was that the C/C++ model of computation (which allows very flexible access to storage via pointers) is crucial to achieving generality without losing efficiency.
It eventually led to the development of the Standard Template Library of C++.
See also
References
{{Reflist}}
Further reading
- {{cite web| url=http://www.stlport.org/resources/StepanovUSA.html| title=STLport: An Interview with A. Stepanov| last=Stepanov| first=Alexander| access-date=2010-04-21| author-link=Alexander Stepanov}}
External links
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- [http://www.stepanovpapers.com/ Collected Papers of Alexander A. Stepanov]
- [http://www.stlport.org/resources/StepanovUSA.html An interview of Stepanov, from STLport], 1997
- [http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/drdobbs-interview.html Another interview], from Dr. Dobbs, March 1995
- [http://sourceforge.net/projects/rpa Range Partition Adapters] A STL-based multi-threaded library, inspired from an article of Alexander Stepanov.
- [http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1383185 An interview], by Andrew Binstock, with Alexander Stepanov and Paul McJones on [http://www.elementsofprogramming.com/ Elements of Programming].
- [https://www.youtube.com/user/A9Videos/videos?sort=da&flow=list&view=0 A9 Video] lectures by Alexander Stepanov.
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