Bjarne Stroustrup developed C++ as an extension of C, originally called “C with Classes.”
Stroustrup began the work at Bell Labs in 1979, seeking a language that combined C’s efficiency with Simula-inspired support for classes and object-oriented programming. The project was initially called “C with Classes.”
The name C++ was adopted in 1983. It uses C’s increment operator as a playful suggestion that the language was an enhanced successor to C. C++ later gained templates, exception handling, the Standard Template Library, and many other features.
C++ is sometimes confused with C# because both names use a symbol, but they are different languages. C# was created at Microsoft in the early 2000s, while C++ grew directly from Stroustrup’s C extension work at Bell Labs.