Dennis Ritchie invented the C Programming Language while working at Bell Labs. His contributions to Computer Science, Unix and more cannot even be expressed in this little blog post.
I was first introduced to Ritchie’s work in college during my first programming class in the fall of 1998. I’ll never forget the first program I compiled. I was working with the Borland Turbo C Compiler and my professor had taught us how to write a simple “Hello World” program.
We saved our little programs onto a 3.5″ floppy disk and inserted it into the professor’s computer. He then had us run a verification program that would test our “Hello World” app to make sure it worked correctly.
This was all very exciting for a geek like me.
Ritchie’s work on C paved the way for Object-Oriented programming with C++ (a clever way to say “The Next Iteration of C”) by Bjarne Stroustrup. This work eventually spawned Java by James Gosling.
Java, originally written to power toasters and appliances, would eventually become the core technology that powered the web for several years. It’s funny how life works like that sometimes.
C eventually would be the backbone of Perl which ultimately spawned PHP.
Apple, Inc uses Objective-C (another object-oriented flavor of C) for the lion-share (pun intended) of their development.
Where would technology be without Mr. Ritchie’s contributions?
