Dennis Ritchie-Father of C

Dennis Ritchie, born on September 9, 1941 in Bronxville, New York, was the man who created the “C” programming language and hence, is known as the Father of the C programming language. Surprisingly, his father was a switching system engineer at Bell Laboratories, the birth place of pioneer languages, C and C++. Ritchie was a PhD in Mathematics in 1968 from Harvard University but later on went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this article, we will see the role of this legendary personality in the development of the C language and the UNIX.

Before the success of UNIX as an OS, Ritchie worked on the Multics project. Due to the over-engineering involved in Multics, Bell Laboratories stopped working on it. However, Ritchie and his co-worker, Ken Thomson didn’t abandon the concept of their project and they went on to develop its successor, UNIX. That modern OS was announced to the world in 1973. It will be quite astonishing to learn that C language was launched in 1978. So, what was used to develop UNIX?

The original UNIX kernel was written in the assembly language. However, Richie and Ken decided to give them more control over all the data which spanned the OS. So, they used higher level, BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) to write UNIX, by squeezing it into 8 kilobytes and renamed it as “B” language. Now, to resolve that problem, Ritchie developed C language as an upgrade to B. This is how the world’s most beautiful and most popular language came into existence.

Dennis Ritchie says that, “UNIX IS BASICALLY A SIMPLE OPERATING SYSTEM, BUT YOU HAVE TO BE A GENIUS TO UNDERSTAND THE SIMPLICITY.”

In addition to this, Dennis Ritchie also authored the book, “The C Programming Language”. Reading that book would be an amazing experience to learn the C language from the creator itself. However, a sad though astonishing fact, the pioneer died a week after death of another pioneer, Steve Jobs but he did not receive as much media coverage as Jobs.

The Fedora 16 Linux Distribution, was released and dedicated to his memory in 2012.

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