In this chapter, we take a brief look at the what of C++: examining its inception, origin, and the landscape of the language as it appears at the time of writing. C++ is an imperative (i.e., non-assembly) programming language initially developed by Bjarne Stroustrup in 1979. The road to C++ started from Fortran, the progenitor of imperative languages. Algol evolved from Fortran in the sense that it added emphasis on structured programming through the introduction of code blocks. From Algol, the programming language landscape quickly bifurcated in terms of abstractions that either 1) allowed programmers to easily reason about the problem they are solving or 2) easily model the underlying hardware so that programs could be human-readable yet still run efficiently. C++ reunites these two branches, bringing the best of both worlds and, if you are not careful, also the worst.