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Dennis Ritchie, Creator of C Programming Language, Passed Away

Posted by samzenpus on from the code-in-peace dept.

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."

7 of 725 comments (clear)

  1. dmr by suso · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:dmr by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  2. And no patents by msobkow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
    1. Re:And no patents by ericvids · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
  3. I have nothing intelligent to post by Windwraith · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  4. Re:Not just the apps by Rhaban · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    Thank you Dennis.

  5. Shaped many of our careers... by jregel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.