Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941 – October 12, 2011) was an American computer scientist. He is most well known for creating the C programming language.
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| Dennis Ritchie at the Japan Prize Foundation in May 2011 |
Ritchie is primarily recognized as the progenitor of the C programming language, a key contributor to the development of the Unix operating system, and co-author of the seminal work, "The C Programming Language." He formed the 'R' in K&R, a common reference to the book's authors, Kernighan and Ritchie. Ritchie collaborated closely with Ken Thompson, who is credited with crafting the initial iteration of Unix. One of Ritchie's significant achievements within the Unix realm was its adaptation to various machines and platforms. Their impact on Research Unix was so profound that Doug McIlroy later remarked, "The names of Ritchie and Thompson are almost synonymous with anything not otherwise credited."
Ritchie was keen to stress that he was merely one member of a collective effort. He maintained that many of the improvements he introduced simply seemed like the right course of action and that others in a similar context might have made the same decisions.
Presently, the C programming language holds widespread utility in applications, operating systems, and the development of embedded systems. Its influence permeates most contemporary programming languages. C is a low-level language with constructs closely aligned with the hardware's instruction set. Nonetheless, it remains hardware-agnostic, facilitating the creation of programs on any machine supporting C. Furthermore, C possesses high-level language characteristics, with constructs that map directly to the data structures used in applications.
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| Ken Thompson (left) and Dennis Ritchie (right), in 1973 |
C has significantly influenced numerous other programming languages and derivatives, including C++, Objective-C (employed by Apple), C# (utilized by Microsoft), and Java (extensively used in corporate settings and on Android platforms). Ritchie and Thompson employed C in crafting Unix, which has played a pivotal role in establishing fundamental computing concepts and principles broadly embraced across the industry.
In an interview from 1999, Ritchie clarified that he saw Linux and BSD operating systems as a continuation of the basis of the Unix operating system, and as derivatives of Unix:
" I think the Linux phenomenon is quite delightful because it draws so strongly on the basis that Unix provided. Linux seems to be among the healthiest of the direct Unix derivatives, though there are also the various BSD systems as well as the more official offerings from the workstation and mainframe manufacturers. "
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