Alexander Stepanov

Alexander Alexandrovich Stepanov (Russian: 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,[1] 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++.

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.