Dennis Ritchie: The man behind C programming language

BANGALORE, INDIA: Much before the world had even heard the term open systems, two computer scientists at the then AT&T Bell Labs, decided to try something completely unheard of. They tried to see if they could 'port' an operating system, developed by them, along with a few more colleagues a couple of years back, to different machines.

One of them, Dennis Ritchie, thought the best way to do that was to create a 'high level' programming language and recode the entire operating system-UNIX-in that language. The operating system, originally written in machine language in 1969 was almost entirely rewritten in C-the new language that Ritchie developed-by 1973.

Anyone reading this, you don't have to be told what and how much UNIX and C have contributed to the computing world in particular, and the world, in general. Yet, when on 12th October 2011, Ritchie was found dead in his house, there was little coverage in traditional media and the web.

While the serious computing community was ...... by his death, the world at large, which was still mourning the death of Steve Jobs, who had passed away a week back, did not even notice it. In any case, few outside the tech community knew-or know today-who he was.

“In reality, anyone who uses Internet or anyone who uses a computing device today, is doing that because of the contribution made by dmr,” wrote a blogger. Ritchie was popularly known as dmr, his user name.

Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX,” Wired.com site said quoting Rob Pike, Ritchie's ex-colleague, current Google employee, and co-author of one of the most popular books on UNIX systems programming, Unix Programming Environment. “The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel - that pretty much the entire Internet runs on - is written in C,” Pike was furher quoted by the site. That pretty much gives an idea of the direct impact that C has had on the computing world-and today, on the Internet, that has taken computing to pretty much everybody's lives.

The indirect impact is much more. C was the first step to achieve what are today called portability, open, and interoperability. It allowed programmers to write codes without bothering so much about what machine the programs would run on. That was a small step for those who wanted to port UNIX to machines other than pdp11, the DEC machine on which it was created. But that was a giant leap for the computing world.

That is not all. C 'influenced' almost all the languages and environments that followed-be it C++ or Java. Most of these conceptually borrowed from the syntax of C. Many even call them C derivatives.

UNIX, to the development of which Ritchie greatly contributed, and whose C made it possible it to be ported to other machines, is, even today, in its different avatars,the de-facto OS for anything that is mission critical. Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Linux-all these are derived from UNIX.

While Ritchie, along with Ken Thompson, won the Turing award in 1983, and did win the National Medal of Technology from the US president in 1999, his contributions are still not recognized enough.