C++’s origins date back to 1979, when Bjarne Stroustrup, the programming language’s creator, first began work on the language that was then known as “C with Classes”.

It's the top or one of the top two languages in most notable language popularity indexes, and even looks set to beat Java these days. But 35-year-old Python does have its weaknesses.

Becoming popular in the early 1990s and the norm today, object-oriented programming (OOP) languages, such as C++ and Java, provide a formal set of rules for creating and managing objects.

Over time, from the development of assembly language through more human-readable languages like C and Python and Java, programming has climbed what computer scientists call increasing levels of ...