It wasn't originally made to be classified as a new language, in fact it was made to be basically "C with classes." It was created by Bjarne Stroustrup to be basically the earliest version of C object-oriented programming. In some ways it's easier than C (std::cin for instance is I think easier than C scanf), in other ways it's more confusing/harder. It's one of the world's most popular programming languages, and is extremely powerful (if you know how to use it properly). It's defined as a general purpose language (it can do pretty much any job you want it to), and a middle-level language (it's easier to write/read than a language like C, but harder to write/read than Java or Python).
:)
