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◈ALB Atlas

C Alive

C
KindProgramming language
Appeared1972
StatusAlive
CreatorDennis Ritchie / Bell Labs
FamilyC
Sourcewww.bell-labs.com ↗

Ritchie's portable assembly for Unix — small enough to hold in your head, powerful enough to reimplement the OS it rode in on. The load-bearing language of computing.

Descended from B
Created by Bell Labs Dennis Ritchie
Descendants Objective-C C++ HolyC
Influenced Go
Things written in it Research Unix Linux Python
Predecessors B
Described in The Development of the C Language

Ritchie's C (1972) added types to B for the PDP-11 — byte-addressed, close to metal, portable via its own compiler. It was designed to write Unix in, and it did: the 1973 C rewrite made Unix the first portable OS.\n\nK&R C (1978), ANSI C (1989), and every descendant (C++, Objective-C, Java's syntax, C#, Rust's ancestors) — C is the most influential language ever written.

→ Read the full article on the ALB Wiki

Timeline

1972Created for Unix on the PDP-11
1978K&R published
1989ANSI C89
2018C17/C18

Sources

  1. bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language)