B is a programming language developed at Bell Labs circa 1969. It is the work of Ken Thompson with Dennis Ritchie.B was derived from BCPL, and its name may be a contraction of BCPL. Thompson's coworker Dennis Ritchie speculated that the name might be based on Bon, an earlier, but unrelated, programming language that Thompson designed for use on Multics.B was designed for recursive, non-numeric, machine independent applications, such as system and language software.