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RIP Dennis Ritchie, Co-Creator of Unix and Creator of the C Programming Language
Computer scientist Dennis Ritchie wasn’t as famous as Steve Jobs, but his contributions to technology are at least as mammoth. Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs confirmed today that Ritchie died October 8th. He was best known as the co-creator of Unix and creator of the C programming language, both at Bell Labs. He was also the author of C Programming Language with Brian Kernighan, a book known as the bible of C programming.
Unix became the model for Berkley Systems Distribution (BSD), GNU\Linux, and QNX. BSD became the foundation for Apple’s OSX. Linux powers not only desktop and server distributions like Ubuntu and Red Hat, but mobile operating systems such as Android, MeeGo and WebOS. RIM bought QNX in 2010 and has made it the basis for BlackBerry Tablet OS, and will be used in future BlackBerry handsets.
C and its extension C++ went on to influence almost every major programming language that came after it, including Objective C, C#, Java, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python and JavaScript. Ritchie also worked on both BCPL and B, which were predecessors of C. Most operating systems and a huge number of desktop applications (including most Web browsers) are written in whole or in part in C or C++.
Ritchie’s later work included the Plan 9 operating system and Inferno.
Ritchie’s influence is mostly invisible, but chances are whatever device and software you’re reading this on is based on technology developed in part by Ritchie.
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