C++ was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup in the late 1970's mainly in an effort to improve on the C language. Naturally, a programmer coming from the language of C will notice many similarities between C and C++. However, C++ offers potent tools such as inheritance, operator overloading, and object orieted programming. C++ has become one of the most popular languages to learn, and because other languages have been influenced by C++ it is an ideal language to begin with as a first time programmer.