C programming language was developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs to write the UNIX operating system. It became more widely used after Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie published the first description of C in 1978. C is a general purpose, high-level language that is widely used for system programming. It is popular for writing operating systems like Linux and databases like MySQL. C inherits features from earlier languages like B and BCPL.