P. J. Plauger

Plauger worked at Bell Labs from 1969 to 1975, where he coauthored The Elements of Programming Style and Software Tools with Brian Kernighan. In 1978, he founded Whitesmiths, the first company to sell a C compiler and Unix-like operating system (Idris). He has since been involved in C and C++ standardization and is now the president of Dinkumware. In January 2009 he became the convener of the ISO C++ standards committee, but in October 2009 he tendered his resignation after failing to pass a resolution to stop processing any new features in order to facilitate the promised shipping date for the C++0x standard.

Plauger has been credited with inventing pair programming while leading Whitesmiths Ltd.

Plauger has written a number of science fiction stories, notably "Child of All Ages", first published in the March 1975 issue of Analog, which features a protagonist who has achieved immortality at the cost of never growing beyond childhood. The story was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1976. Plauger won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1975—notably beating John Varley for the award—and subsequently sold a story to The Last Dangerous Visions.

Plauger holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Princeton University and a PhD in nuclear physics from Michigan State University.