• The C language was developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Telephone laboratories, primarily as a systems programming language (a language to write operating systems with)
• Ritchie's primary goals were to produce a minimalistic language that was easy to compile, allowed efficient access to memory, produced efficient code, and was self-contained (not reliant on other programs.
• C ended up being so efficient and flexible that in 1973, Ritchie and Ken Thompson rewrote most of the Unix operating system using C
• In 1978, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie published a book called “The C Programming Language”. This book, which was commonly known as K&R (after the authors' last names), provided an informal specification for the language and became a de facto standard
• In 1983, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) formed a committee to establish a formal standard for C. In 1989, they finished, and released the C89 standard, more commonly known as ANSI C.
• In 1990 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted ANSI C (with a few minor modifications). This version of C became known as C90.
• In 1999, the ANSI committee released a new version of C called C99.

• developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs as an extension to C, starting in 1979.
• adds many new features to the C language, and is perhaps best thought of as a superset of C, though this is not strictly true (as C99 introduced a few features that do not exist in C++)
• C++ was standardized in 1998 by the ISO committee
• A minor update to the language was released in 2003 (called C++03).
• Four major updates to the C++ language (C++11, C++14, C++17, and C++20) have been made since then.

• Simple: programs can be broken down into logical units and parts, has a rich library support and a variety of data-types.
• Machine Independent but Platform Dependent: A C++ executable is not platform-independent (compiled programs on Linux won't run on Windows), however they are machine independent.
• Mid-level language: we can do both systems-programming (drivers, kernels, networking etc.) and build large-scale user applications (Media Players, Photoshop, Game Engines etc.)
• Rich library support: rich library support - Both standard (built-in data structures, algorithms etc.) as well as 3rd party libraries (e.g. Boost libraries) for fast and rapid development.
• Execution speed: it is a compiled language, and also hugely procedural. Plus not extra in-built default features (such as garbage-collection, dynamic typing etc) which slow the execution of the program overall.
• Object-Oriented: Object-Oriented support helps C++ to make maintainable and extensible programs. i.e. Large-scale applications can be built.
• Compiled Language: Being a compiled language, contributes to its speed.

    $ g++ --version # g++ compiler version

    $ g++ name_of_program_file.cpp -o name_to_be_assigned_to_executable_file # create an executable file

    $ ./name_to_be_assigned_to_executable_file # execute the executable file