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Dennis Ritchie, father of C programming language, dies


Dennis Ritchie (center) and Ken Thompson receiving the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999. Alcatel-Lucent





In addition to being the creator of C, Ritchie co-authored "The C Programming Language," commonly referred to as K&R (after the authors, Brian Kernighan and Ritchie) and widely considered the definitive work on C. He also made significant contributions to the development of the Unix operating system, for which he received the Turing Award in 1983 (along with Kenneth Thompson).

President Bill Clinton awarded Ritchie and Thompson the National Medal of Technology in 1999 for their contributions to Unix and C. He won many other national and international awards for his work and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988 for "development of the C programming language and for co-development of the Unix operating system."

Ritchie went to work at Bell Labs' Computing Sciences Research Center in 1967 and was widely known as "dmr"--his Bell Labs e-mail address. As part of an AT&T restructuring in the mid-1990s, Ritchie was transferred to Lucent Technologies, where he retired in 2007 as head of System Software Research Department.

In a tribute to Ritchie, Rupert Goodwins of CNET sister site ZDNet UK, offers some observations on Ritchie's work habits and his legacy.

