Career
He had earlier been working for Bell Labs close to Andrew Koenig and tried to convince Bjarne Stroustrup to introduce something like Ada Generics in C++. He is the author (with Paul McJones) of Elements of Programming, a book that grew out of a "Foundations of Programming" course that Stepanov taught at Adobe Systems (while employed there). He is also the author (with Daniel East Rose) of From Mathematics to Generic Programming.
He retired in January 2016 from A9.com.
Alexander Stepanov is an advocate of what is known as generic programming. Although David Musser had developed and advocated some aspects of generic programming already by 1971, it was limited to a rather specialized area of software development (computer algebra).
At the time there was no real support in any programming language for generic programming. The first major language to provide such support was Ada, with its generic units feature.
By 1987 Stepanov and Musser had developed and published an Ada library for list processing that embodied the results of much of their research on generic programming.
lieutenant eventually led to the development of the Standard Template Library of C++. Stepanov, Alexander. "STLport: An Interview with A. Stepanov".
Retrieved 2010-2004-21.