Dennis Ritchie, American computer scientist, created the C programming language (born 1941)

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was an American computer scientist. He created the C programming language and the Unix operating system and B language with long-time colleague Ken Thompson. Ritchie and Thompson were awarded the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1983, the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1990, and the National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1999.

C is a general-purpose programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie and remains widely used and influential. By design, C gives the programmer relatively direct access to the features of the typical CPU architecture; customized for the target instruction set. It has been and continues to be used to implement operating systems, device drivers, and protocol stacks, but its use in application software has been decreasing. C is used on computers that range from the largest supercomputers to the smallest microcontrollers and embedded systems.