Stan Lippman has died (2022)

I remember him from the 2nd hand copy of C++ Primer I bought from someone when I was interviewing for C++ jobs back in the late 90s. It was a little over my head at the time - C++ for dummies was where I was at!

Anyway, rest in peace Stanley. (Also kind of surprised there was no news about his passing in tech circles or HN until after a year - was he not as active perhaps, the last edition for C++ primer was in 2012?)

Stanley Lippman's "C++ Primer" 2e was the first book recommended by an expert, when I started learning C++.

(At the time, this wasn't just another of today's programming language books, of learning a slightly different syntax for essentially the same language or framework. Imagine most work in your industry being done in C, and procedural. But suddenly you can work in this new-to-most paradigm, called OOP, which can multiply the scale of problems you can tackle successfully. But the emerging language for that in your industry is much more complicated, and you need the help of a good teacher.)

Lippman helped teach something important to countless students he never met. Among Lippman's other merits and accomplishments, his family might like to know that he was a teacher to many.

Stan and I worked together at DreamWorks Animation and I kept in touch with him after we both moved on. At DreamWorks, Stan was dealing with some difficult problems such as moving our code from 32 to 64 bits.

It is inevitable that Stan will be remembered for the C++ Primer. When being introduced to Stan, some percentage of people would recognize his name and ask about the book or some other aspect of C++ history. Stan would kindly respond, but I always got the sense that there were other things he would rather discuss than time spent with Bjarne in front of a whiteboard or dealings with various standards bodies.

Stan was complicated and complex. I feel that he would much rather be remembered as a father, an artist, a dancer and a lover of beauty. We usually can't determine how we will be most remembered, but Stan's work on the C++ Primer, while important, is low on my list of memories of him.

I attended a UCLA extension course he gave sometime in the mid-90's. He was clever and funny and taught well. He talked a little about the earliest days of the C++ compiler, when it was mostly horrible C preprocessor macros. It's been a while, but I think he said that he'd worked at Disney on the tech underlying Lion King, the movie, not the show, ride, etc. He was rather pleased with the architecture of a stampede scene; each (water-?)buffalo an instance. I would've liked to spend more time in his company.

I don't remember his death being noted at the time, which is sad. His books are all well worth reading, particularly "Inside the C++ Object Model", which is still relevant.

I bought C++ Primer in 1990 because I needed to learn the language for my masters thesis work. I remember it being unusualy well written, clear, and above all concise. I read it several times back to back over a few days.

Knowing C++ back then (perhaps more than having that MSc) got me my first two jobs.

So thank you Mr Lippman, and rest easy.

I've also known him as one of the architects of c++ cli while in Microsoft. I found this enthusiastic introduction I remembered reading circa 2005 [0]. Notice the bio at the end.

I remember reading a considerably less reserved and funnier blog post by him about c++ cli at the time, I remember wondering how it slipped by the msdn editors, and then it was replaced by a watered down version. Can't find it now.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2005...

Wow, didn't know that. RIP. I was eagerly waiting for the 6th edition of C++ Primer (with Josée Lajoie and Barbara Moo) but looks like that might be delayed indefinitely. The 5th edition is what really got C++11 to click for me, very clear exposition.

His books on C++ were good. I wrote a few C++ books for McGraw-Hill and J. Wiley, but my books were just C++ projects books, I didn’t try to teach the language the way Stan did.

C++ Primer is a great book. Thanks Stan!

RIP Stanley. Thanks for your book!

Circa July 31, 2022. Over a year old….

wrong Wikipedia link? Should be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_B._Lippman

The link points to a wrong bio on wiki

F