"C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group." -- Dennis Ritchie
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (username: dmr, born September 9, 1941) is an American computer scientist notable for his influence on C and other programming languages, and on operating systems such as Multics and Unix. He received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology 1998 on April 21, 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007.
"A new release of Plan 9 happened in June, and at about the same time a new release of the Inferno system, which began here, was announced by Vita Nuova.""Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9.""At least for the people who send me mail about a new language that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to write a compiler.""At the same time, much of it seems to have to do with recreating things we or others had already done; it seems rather derivative intellectually; is there a dearth of really new ideas?""C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new.""C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.""For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.""I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate.""I fix things now and then, more often tweak HTML and make scripts to do things.""I'm just an observer of Java, and where Microsoft wants to go with C# is too early to tell.""I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.""I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.""Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson.""Over the past several years, I've been more in a managerial role.""The kind of programming that C provides will probably remain similar absolutely or slowly decline in usage, but relatively, JavaScript or its variants, or XML, will continue to become more central.""The visible things that have come from the group have been the Plan 9 system and Inferno, but I hasten to say that the ideas and the work have come from colleagues.""UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.""When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd."
Born in Bronxville, New York, Ritchie graduated from Harvard University with degree in physics and applied mathematics. In 1967, he began working at the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center.
Ritchie is best known as the creator of the C programming language and a key developer of the Unix operating system, and as co-author of the definitive book on C, The C Programming Language, commonly referred to as K&R (in reference to the authors Kernighan and Ritchie).
Ritchie's invention of C and his role in the development of Unix alongside Ken Thompson have placed him as an important pioneer of modern computing. The C language is still widely used today in application and operating system development, and its influence is seen in most modern programming languages. Unix has also been influential, establishing concepts and principles that are now well-established precepts of computing.
Ritchie has said that creating the C language "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, though Bell Labs colleague Bjarne Stroustrup, developer of C++, said that "if Dennis had decided to spend that decade on esoteric math, Unix would have been stillborn."
Following the success of Unix, Ritchie continued research into operating systems and programming languages with contributions to the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems and the Limbo programming language.
In 1983, Ritchie and Ken Thompson jointly received the Turing Award for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system. Ritchie's Turing Award lecture was titled "Reflections on Software Research".
National Medal of Technology
On April 21, 1999, Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the 1998 National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton for co-inventing the UNIX operating system and the C programming language which together have led to enormous advances in computer hardware, software, and networking systems and stimulated growth of an entire industry, thereby enhancing American leadership in the Information Age.
