LEDE: The 5-hundred-thousand-dollar Draper Prize for Engineering will be awarded here in D-C on Tuesday…for an innovation you likely use every day without even knowing about it.

Randy Atkins: The C-plus-plus programming language is integral to a huge variety of computer systems…from those that run your cell phone to Google’s search engine to high-tech games. Bjarne Stroustrup, a computer scientist now working for the financial firm Morgan Stanley, created it while working at Bell Labs. He wanted a high performance software great at…

Bjarne Stroustrup: …manipulating the hardware directly…

Randy Atkins: …but a language that could also handle the complexity of different computers interacting with each other.

Bjarne Stoustrup: There was nothing that could do both. And so I built one.

Randy Atkins: Now millions of programmers around the world use C-plus-plus to build medical devices, control systems, artificial intelligence applications and much more.

Bjarne Stoustrup: For every Grand Challenge, if you get a solution, you’ll find some C++ somewhere on the bottom where you can’t see it.

Randy Atkins: With the National Academy of Engineering, Randy Atkins, WTOP News.

• Draper Prize news release
• Bjarne Stroustrup homepage