David Musser

David Musser, usually called Dave, is a professor emeritus of computer science at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, United States. He is known for his work in generic programming, particularly as applied to C++, and for his collaboration with Alexander Stepanov. Their joint work includes coining the term generic programming in a 1989 paper by Musser and Stepanov, and it led to the creation of the C++ Standard Template Library (STL). In a 1997 paper Musser developed the sorting algorithm called introsort, also known as introspective sort, and the related selection algorithm called introselect, to provide algorithms that are both efficient and have optimal worst-case performance for use in the STL.