Dennis Ritchie, Creator of C Programming Language, Passed Away

WankerWeasel writes "The sad news of the death of another tech great has come. Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language and a key developer of the Unix operating system, has passed away. For those of us running Mac OS X, iOS, Android and many other non-Windows OS, we have him to thank. Many of those running Windows do too, as many of the applications you're using were written in C."

Comments

Re:Goodbye

[smash]

As stated above. Without C, we wouldn't have Unix (which he also co-developed), Windows, OS X (and thus the i-devices) or most of the other modern operating systems. His contributions will live on.

SFW link, please

[bjb]

Sorry to rant about this, but for the folks who live behind a websense firewall, a social networking site like Google+ is as good as no link at all.

Spent 5 seconds to find one that isn't blocked by proxy servers:

Father of C and UNIX Dennis Ritchie passes away at age 70

Re:Not just the apps

[TheRaven64]

C is actually a subset of c++ as in all c programs will compile with a c++ compiler but C++ will not compile in a c compiler.

No it isn't. Some examples:

int class;

Valid C, not valid C++. How about a more complicated one?

int f();
int g()
{
f(1, 2, "three");
}

Valid C, not valid C++. Or another simple one:

int a;
void *foo = &a;
int *b = foo;

Once again, valid C, not valid C++. The semantics of inline are very different in C and C++. And here's a really fun one:

#include <stdio.h>

int foo;

int main(void)
{
struct foo { int a, b, c; };
printf("%d\n", (int)sizeof(foo));
return 0;
}

If sizeof(int) is 4 and alignof(int) is 4, this prints 4 in C and 12 in C++.

Why am I such a geek?

I didn't know that the definition of 'geek' had been changed to 'someone who believes falsehoods'.

Re:He was an atheist

[Chrisq]

You know, the majority of all people ever born has not yet died. Therefore the evidence that everyone eventually dies is not very good. :-)

Rubbish

Re:Goodbye

[TheRaven64]

The FSF came into being because RMS had a printer with a buggy driver and couldn't fix it. With Smalltalk, the image contains all of the code. In a traditional Smalltalk environment, it's basically impossible to distribute code that the end user can't fix. If RMS' printer driver had been in Smalltalk, he'd have just fixed it and moved on, not founded the FSF.

Re:And no patents

[LizardKing]

C was not written by a team of computer scientists, it was written by two telecoms software engineers. It was based on Thompson's earlier language B, which was inspired by BCPL. Having read the book on BCPL, I can assure you that C resembles it as much as Java resembles Smalltalk. As for C#, it's a clone of Java. Java was inspired by Goslng's experience with Objective C and NeXT's framework, which were in turn inspired by Smalltalk (Gosling encountered Objective C when Sun Microsystems were toying with idea of adopting OpenStep as their desktop). As for academics, the ones I've worked with use Perl, C, Java, Fortran and in one instance Pascal. I've never in almost twenty years of professional coding encountered even one person using Haskell, Erlang or a Lisp dialect. The nearest I've seen is one abortive attempt by a colleague to use DSSSL (based on Scheme) for a project in the late 1990's.

Re:dmr

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes time, but it is percolating up to broader/general media.

Stuff that matters

[Torodung]

Now this matters. Goodbye and well done.