Creator of C programming language dies

Dennis Ritchie, the creator of programming language C, has reportedly died. According to a Google+ post by Google engineer and former colleague, Rob Pike, the 70-year-old died at home over the weekend following a long illness.

Ritchie was born September 1941 in Bronxville New York, and graduated from Harvard with degrees in mathematics and physics before Bell Labs employed him in 1968. In 1971, Ritchie worked with engineer Ken Thompson to develop Unix. Two years later, he created C.

C is currently the world's second most popular programming language (just behind Java), according to coding standards company TIOBE's programming community index for October 2011, while variants C++, C# and Objective-C occupy positions three, five and six respectively.