About Beman

I met Beman Dawes when I attended my first C++ committee meeting in 1997. I wasn’t even a committee member at that time; I showed up at the meeting because I was trying to get exception safety into the C++ standard and Andrew Koenig had made it clear that arguing for it over email wasn’t going to cut it; I needed to show my face.

I didn’t know what to expect; I sat in one of the chairs at the edge of the room while the committee took seats at a big “U” of tables in the center. After some preliminary business, the meeting broke into Core and Library “working groups.” Since exception safety was mostly a library issue, I stayed with the library group, of which Beman was the chair.

Beman started by asking me to join the other members in the center of the room and filling me in on the job at hand: working through issues people had reported with the draft C++ standard. That was my first indication of the extraordinarily inclusive tone he set for these meetings. Everyone, and every idea, was treated with collegial respect, and the spirit of openness and contribution flowing from Beman had clearly “infected” the other participants. I cautiously made a few points, which were greeted with appreciation, where I thought I could contribute.

I left that meeting with the realization that it was possible to work together in a way I had never experienced in my regular job, driven by consensus, and that this spirit both raised the level of discourse, and produced better results, than what I had seen before. It put the lie to the disparaging phrase “designed by committee.” So when Beman proposed that we start the Boost Libraries project, I was immediately on board. His idea for Boost would blossom into a unique community of collaborative library designers because of the example he set.

As we grew Boost over the years, so grew our friendship, and when Beman passed away suddenly in 2020, it was a great loss to me personally, and, I think, to the world of programming. Beman never sought the spotlight, and I always wondered what would become of his contribution, which was surely underappreciated. That’s why I was so thrilled to hear that a modern C++ libraries project was being launched in his name. May it continue to demonstrate Beman’s commitment to community and excellence.