Dennis Ritchie

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941) is a computer scientist notable for his influence on ALTRAN, B, BCPL, C, Multics, and Unix.

C and Unix

When asked what influenced him in developing C in the manner he did, Ritchie has been quoted to have said that it "looked like a good thing to do", and that anyone else in the same place at the same time would have done the same thing. Many, however, have said that this is part of Ritchie's modest personality. One of his Bell Labs colleagues, Bjarne Stroustrup, who developed and designed the C++ programming language, an object oriented version of C, has been quoted to have said that "If Dennis had decided to spend that decade on esoteric math, Unix would have been stillborn". Indeed, being the inventor of the C programming language, as well as co-inventor of the Unix operating system alongside Ken Thompson, Ritchie has earned an important position in the history of the computer industry. C is still widely used today in application and operating system development and its influence can be seen in many more recent programming languages such as C++, C#, Objective-C, Java, and JavaScript. In the operating system world, Unix is also quite influential; there are many dialects of it available on the market today, such as AIX, Solaris, Mac OS X, BSD, and similar systems like Minix, as well as the popular Linux operating system which is considered to be the crowning achievement of the open source and free software movements. Indeed, even Microsoft, whose Windows operating systems compete with Unix, has developed Unix compatibility tools and C compilers for users and developers of their products.

Related Topics:
Quoted - Bjarne Stroustrup - C++ - Unix - Ken Thompson - Operating system - C# - Objective-C - Java - JavaScript - AIX - Solaris - Mac OS X - BSD - Minix - Linux - Open source - Free software - Microsoft - Windows

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Dennis has also contributed to the two official successors of Unix and C: the Plan 9 operating system and the Limbo programming language, both of which build upon his previous work.

Related Topics:
Plan 9 - Limbo programming language

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