Dennis Ritchie is called the father of the C programming language. His full name is Dennis MacAlisar Ritchie. He is an American Computer Scientist. Dennis Ritchie developed the C language. He was given the Turing Award. He was awarded the Hamming Medal in the year 1990. American President Bill Clinton presented him with the National Medal of Technology in the year 1999.
Dennis Ritchie was from New York City, and his father worked as a scientist in Bell Labs. Dennis Ritchie was a Harvard University graduate. He graduated in Physics and applied mathematics.
Ritchie Doctorate was in “Computational Complexity and Program Structure.” Ritchie also worked at Bell Labs was an active participant in the development of the Multics operating system. Riche was also a member of the development team of two other operating systems named Plan 9 and Inferno.
Ritchie was retired from Lucent Technologies in the year 2007.
Denis Ritchie is best known as the father of the C programming language. In addition, he played a key role in the development of the Unix operating system. Dennis Ritchie also gave Unix portability features.
C language is widely used in Application Software, Embedded Systems, and Operating systems. In addition, the C programming language became the base of many other programming languages such as Java, C#, etc. Apple has also used the C language in macOS.
Dennis Richie became a fellow of the Computer History Museum in the year 1997. Dennies Ritchie was awarded the Achievement Award in 2005 by the Industrial Research Institute for his countable contribution in the domain of Science and Technology. In addition, he was awarded the Japan Prize of Information and Communications for his contribution to the development Unix Operating System.
Dennis Ritchie’s C and Unix operating systems set the base for the development of the iPhone. Two software was dedicated to honoring him. The name of these two software included – Fedora 16 Linux and FreeBSD.
Dennis Ritchie also contributed to the development of the B programming language. He also developed a manual that gave an insight into the Unix Operating System.
Dennis Richie wrote many research papers, books, and textbooks. For example, he wrote the book on the C language, which was published by Prentice Hall publications.
Dennis Richie became a fellow at Bell Labs in the year 1983 and became a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in the year 1988. At Bell labs in 1990, he was promoted as the head of the System Software Research Department.
Dennis Ritchie was not social and was happier to live a private life. Dennis Ritchie’s personal life and Professional life chemistry life were rated good and mixed both. Other scientists often said that even after working for 20 years, they don’t know him. Dennis Ritchie did his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in the year 1963.
ACM awarded Dennis Ritchie in the year 1974 for his research paper in systems and languages. IEEE also awarded him in the year 1982. ACM awarded him in the year 1983 for his work in the domain of Software Systems. In the year 1990, he was awarded the Hamming Medal of IEEE.
Dennise Ritchie also worked on the ALTRAN compiler that translated source code into machine language.
“The C Programming Language” research paper of Dennies Ritchie in the year 1978 got 10083 citations, his next research paper “The UNIX time-Sharing system” in the year 1977 got 2263 citations, “Advanced Programming in the UNIX environment” in the year 1992 got 1260 citations, research paper “A stream input-output system” in the year 1984 got 478, the research paper “The development of the C language” in the year 1993 got 395 citations, the research paper “The state of C” in the year 1988 got 368 citations, the research paper “The Evolution of the Unix time-sharing system” has 300 citations in the year 1979, the research paper “The Complexity of loop programs” has 251 citations which came in the year 1967, the research “Portability of C Programs and the UNIX System” has 209 citations in the year 1978, the research paper “The Inferno operating system” has 179 citations in the year 1997, the research paper “Protection of data file content” has 153 citations in the year 1979, the research paper “UNIX Programmer Manual” has 128 citations in th year 1971, the research paper “The M4 macro processor” has 105 citation which came in the year 1971 and the research paper “The C programming language – Reference manual” came in the year 1983 and has many citation.
There were also other research papers that did not have any citation these included – “C Session” in the year 1996, “The Continued Debate On Software Patents” in the year 1992, “UNIX” in the year 1981, “UNIX Programming” in the year 1979 and “Computational Complexity and Program Structure” in the year 1967.
There exist many quotes given by Dennis Ritchie few of which are given below:
“UNIX belongs to simplicity.”
“It will be hard to displace C.”
“I did not have any hero.”
“C will be in and around always.”
At MIT, Dennis Ritchie did documentation and proofreading. He also worked on the file system and was busy writing file system descriptions. Dennis Ritchie was not involved in programming at MIT. Dennis Ritchies also worked on the recursive theory and Computational Complexity. He also worked as a teacher and taught basic programming courses.
According to Dennis Ritchie, the C language became popular for two reasons: first, the UNIX operating system and C language have a strong relationship. Second, there is C interaction with hardware.
Dennis Ritchie was found dead in New Jersey at his home at the age of 70 in 2011. He died because of bad health. He suffered from prostate cancer and heart disease.
