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

dmr

[suso]

Mourn for his passing, but celebrate his life. He didn't just change the world, he make world.

Re:dmr

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet there won't even by any news in most places about him, because he didn't make shiny things.

Re:dmr

[genjix]

>Greedy misanthropist that sold shiny gadgets with sweatshop labor dies and is praised by millions.

>Creator of the most widely used programming language of all time and pioneer of Unix, both arguably a significant contributing factor to the success of every modern tech company, dies and not a single newspaper cares.

Inventor of C and UNIX. 4chan has a sticky for him. That's the extent of media coverage I could find.

A real legend of technology has died and nobody will even understand what he did.

exit(0);

Re:dmr

[TheGratefulNet]

he wasn't famous for being famous or sleeping around. he wasn't a sports hero. he didn't ruin an economy (or several). he didn't make billion dollar films. he didn't start or fight in wars.

therefore, no one in the media cares. ;(

yeah, we have our priorities right in this world. oh yeah.

Not just the apps

[drsmithy]

Most of Windows is written in C.

Re:Not just the apps

[Rhaban]

Most of everything computer-related owes something to C.
Without his work, the whole world would not be the same.

Thank you Dennis.

Re:Not just the apps

[Rhaban]

I think there are very few, if not none, things where C would be the best language to use anymore.
But when it was created, it was another world, and low level languages were needed because there was a lot less computing power available, and you didn't want to waste any.

But the larger part of the C heritage is not in application written in C, but in everything written in languages derived from C (like C++), or derived from languages derived from C (like almost every language less than 30 years old).

Thank you

[deconvolution]

I am NOT glad he's dead, I am also NOT glad he's gone.

And no patents

[msobkow]

Dennis Ritchie had an impact on the technology world FAR beyond what Jobs and Apple could ever dream of. Do you have any idea how many billions of lines of C code are running in the world, or how many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Unix-derived systems are running? Linux, OS/X, AIX, Solaris, HP/UX -- they all owe their origins to this man. Rest in peace, sir.

Had he been a patent hound, he'd have died a rich man.

Re:And no patents

[erroneus]

This is as it always has been.

The whole of humanity celebrates celebrities. (I wonder if there is a connection between those two words?) The reality is as reality always has been. Steve Jobs was a greedy sociopath. The people who actually make and do things are employed and used by the previously mentioned sociopaths.

It is an EXTREMELY rare person who can create great things and also be a great leader and icon. At the moment, I can't think of any. But other parallel examples of this scenario come to mind -- Edison vs. Tesla jumps to the front of my mind where Edison didn't so as much as people seem to think he did while Tesla's 'miracles' are still being rediscovered today.

You can bemoan the injustice of it all, but I have to ask you, who do you follow when you follow anyone? Even you have to admit the fact that marketing is far more important than cold hard facts and results. Intellectually, facts and results are appealing, but we are EMOTIONAL creatures as much as we would like to hide or suppress that fact. When it comes to buying, voting or even just admiring, we rely on emotion, not intellect.

Re:And no patents

[Anonymous Coward]

If he had been a patent hound, we'd be years behind where we are now in software.

Re:And no patents

[ericvids]

The 'worse is better' philosophy is more an argument about simplicity rather than price ("worse" functionality correlates to "better" practicality). Some of the best patents are actually for simple inventions used to do something novel. The novelty in UNIX and C isn't price (i.e., cheap/free), but portability (they're VERY simple designs yet powerful enough to write a self-compiler) -- and that made it better than the alternatives such as Algol. Not just marginally, it really WAS much better because hardware was developing so fast at the time (birth of personal computing, remember?) and Algol simply couldn't keep up.

Ritchie definitely could have made a large profit from the whole shebang if he wanted to. He didn't.

I have nothing intelligent to post

[Windwraith]

...but this is just sad. This guy did stuff I care about.
Godspeed.

Shaped many of our careers...

[jregel]

It's no exaggeration that without Dennis Ritchie's contributions, many of us would have very different careers. I've been fortunate to spend the first 12 years of my IT career working on multiple Unix and Linux systems, and although I'm not much of a coder, I've compiled a fair amount of C and recognise that if it hadn't been invented, neither would C++ or C#, which constitutes a lot of the code in use today.

Without Unix, what would the Internet been built on? Perhaps something like VMS? Would tools like Sendmail or BIND been developed in those environments? The influence of Unix can be seen everywhere in IT.

Actually, without Unix, we wouldn't have had NeXTstep, which became MacOS X, which became iOS. We wouldn't have had Minix or Linux, so no Android. So the mobile landscape would have been different as well.

I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say that Dennis Ritchie's legacy is the IT industry we have today. Most of us stand on this giant's shoulders.

RIP Dennis Ritchie.

Re:Goodbye

[MightyMartian]

If Einstein had not developed Relativity, someone else would have, so I guess we can just sort of ignore or make light his contributions to physics on /. to make ourselves look kewl.

Bullshit. Much more than Steve Jobs Ritchie was one of the key figures in the development of modern computing. C and Unix are among the major touchpoints in computer history, both to soon become dominant players in application development and operating systems.

This is like saying "Someone else would have laid the groundwork of modern computing, so while Alan Turing was a real smart and influential guy..."

Re:He isn't dead

[Vanders]

Surely exit(EXIT_SUCCESS); is more fitting for a man of Dennis Ritchie's talents?

What is wrong with you people?

[Kyusaku Natsume]

Men like Ritchie developed the tools that we enjoy to use to do our jobs, men like Steve Jobs brought the customers that pay for the food in our table and the roof over our heads. The praise that both have received is well deserved, and, in the case of Ritchie, it has been far too low for his accomplishments.

Richie > Jobs .

[Thud457]

Dennis Richie was one of the giants who Steve Jobs stood on the shoulders of.

Re:My memory of Dennis Ritchie

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worth noting that the guy who wrote the fucking manual didn't answer by telling you to RTFM.