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

[alphatel]

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the demigodic party.

Re:dmr

[ericvids]

He didn't just change the world, he make world.

I thought he just said hello to it... :)

RIP

Re:dmr

[RivenAleem]

I C what you did there.

Re:dmr

[Anonymous Coward]

"I C what you did there." plus thinking objectively he had class

Re:dmr

[Anonymous Coward]

He was certainly a strong type.

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

[Canazza]

he gave us more than a few pointers

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.

Re:dmr

[Ynot_82]

pointers are redundant...
obviously a java dev

Re:dmr

[loxfinger]

My computer science professors, back in the mid 1980's, were highly suspicious of any computer book thicker than "The C Programming Language." I understand now how they respected Dennis' gift for concision.

Re:dmr

[bhsurfer]

I was thinking about that book myself - I don't know that I've ever read a better programming book. Not only could the guy invent a language but he could write well enough to explain it in as easy a manner as possible given the subject matter. That's a talented guy right there.

Re:dmr

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:dmr

[Zancarius]

I was thinking about that book myself - I don't know that I've ever read a better programming book. Not only could the guy invent a language but he could write well enough to explain it in as easy a manner as possible given the subject matter. That's a talented guy right there.

If you (or others) haven't read his essays on the history of C and UNIX, you should. He was a fantastic writer, and he managed to make such "dry" subjects palatable for even non-programmers. Indeed, reading memoirs of his time at Bell Labs during the 1970s takes you there, with him, while he and his colleges developed the core technologies that would create the world we're in today.

There are several other essays written by him, but those two are the ones I've had bookmarked for a very long time and stand out in my mind.

Goodbye

[menkhaura]

Just a couple of words: Thank You.

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.

Re:Goodbye

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, dmr did have a huge impact on the current state of affairs within the computing industry, and far beyond. But let's not pretend that things wouldn't have developed otherwise. The direction and outcome may have been very different, of course, but progress would have continued.

If C hadn't arisen, we'd likely be using a language derived from PL/I or Pascal, both of which were C's main competitors in the 1970s. Hell, in an alternate world, maybe even Smalltalk would have taken off, had C not been so popular. Computing today would be very different than it is now had that happened. Given the very nature of Smalltalk, it may in fact have been far more open, without the need for the FSF and similar organizations and efforts.

If UNIX hadn't arisen, we may very well be using a system that was based off of TOPS-20 or VMS instead. Those were essentially killed off by UNIX for most lower-end uses throughout the 1970s and 1980s. That wouldn't necessarily have been a bad thing. VMS offered some unique concepts and abilities that UNIX-like systems have only gained recently. It also offered far more flexibility when it came to userland programming languages, with interoperability between languages as diverse as ALGOL, BASIC, FORTRAN, PL/I, and COBOL being almost seamless.

Dmr made some remarkable contributions, no doubt, but there were many, many factors at play that resulted in his creations and discoveries becoming what they are today.

Re:Goodbye

[maxwell demon]

But ... comments like yours seriously piss me off - do you really think that if Ritchie hadn't created C, that no one else would have?

Of course not. Someone might have invented another language fulfilling the same role, and being as good in that. But I strongly doubt that it would have been C. Maybe it would have been a better language. Maybe it would have been a worse language. But it would not have been the same language.

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:Goodbye

[Lisandro]

But ... comments like yours seriously piss me off - do you really think that if Ritchie hadn't created C, that no one else would have?

He still did it, didn't he? He helped created both a low-level language and a OS that are still widely used everywhere, 40 years later.

His contribution to our everyday life shouldn't be understated.

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:Goodbye

[Andrewkov]

No, Windows is written in Visual Basic.

Re:Goodbye

[smash]

I wasn't saying other products would not have eventuated. Maybe they would have been better. But the computing landscape today would look vastly different without his contributions.

Whether you like C or not, it served a very focused purpose: be small and simple enough to be easy to port to new hardware architectures, and be close enough to assembly to get low level shit done.

If C didn't come out and take off, something else with similar characteristics no doubt would have. No, it would NOT be a fully type-safe language with garbage collection, memory protection, etc, etc. It would have likely shared the majority of C's "shortcomings" as that is the nature of the requirements.

Back in the day, those features were way too heavy on performance, and they cripple access to the hardware. C is the way it is for very good reasons. If you can't write code safely in C, then you shouldn't be using it. There are plenty of idiot safe languages for the idiots we have out there writing code these days.

Re:Goodbye

[zeroshade]

The world just doesn't sit stagnant like that.

While agreeing with you that a Unix equivalent would likely have shown up, I'm not so sure about C. (Granted this goes for Kerninghan too, not just Ritchie.) The world prefers to take something it has and continue to improve upon it. C had a ridiculous impact on the syntax and usage of programming languages. The most widely used languages all use many facets of C-Like syntax. Especially in the tech world where legacy code frequently causes projects to never get re-written in a better language. A Unix equivalent would have been written in one of the available languages or a new/completely different language. But it wouldn't have been C.

Despite how long our industry has existed and how fast it moves, the advent of widely used programming languages is surprisingly slow.

I'll agree that we would have equivalents to the languages, devices, and software we have now. But it wouldn't be the same at all, maybe better, maybe worse, but not the same. But you have to admit that the advent of C and Unix shaped the entire direction of the Computing field. It's similar to Steve Jobs. You can't claim that others would not have come up with the same advances in computing, smart phones, portable devices, etc. without him, but you can definitely see that he shaped the entire direction of these things.

not for the things he did not do, which is be the only person who could have moved the community on.

No one said he was the only person, obviously we also have Thompson, Kerninghan, McIlroy, and Ossana. However, without any one of them, the result would have been much different and it is right to point out that the community as it is right now, is what it is due to his accomplishments.

Re:Goodbye

[geekoid]

How is the OS X working out for you?

Funny how you didn't post the same thing about people decrying we wouldn't have computers without Steve Jobs.

"I'm not trying to detract from Ritchies achievements"
The stop doing it.

"however, don't think that he was the only chance for that advancement.."
there is no guarantee of advancements. Never has been. Empires have fallen because no one came up with a solution to a problem. It every case, in hindsight the solution seemed obvious.

Re:Goodbye

[steelfood]

Comparing him to Steve Jobs is a bit disingenuous. They did two very different, but both key functions that led to this modern age of information.

Dennis Ritchie laid the groundwork for modern computing.

Steve Jobs popularized it.

Re:Goodbye

[NoOneInParticular]

I disagree. The facts are that we've seen Unix, an operating system that is extremely well-designed, one that is alive and kicking 40 years after creation. In these forty years we've seen IBM creating alternative systems, we've seen Microsoft creating alternative systems, and we've seen Apple creating alternative systems. Both Apple and IBM have seen the errors in their ways (though Apple is trying it again with iOS, and IBM is still pushing Cobol/mainframe), and now mainly run Unix. Microsoft is hurting badly because their system is not even nearly as sophisticated as Ritchies system developed two decades prior. Given this actual history of computing, I shudder to think what computing would look like these days without Unix being around. Unix is at the heart of computing, purely based on merit, not corporate muscle. Without Ritchie, this would not have happened.

stdout

[Anonymous Coward]

goodbye world

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

[drsmithy]

Most of it is written in C++. A lot of it is written in the C-like subset of C++, but it is not C.

Not according to Windows Internals, Fifth Edition.

Re:Not just the apps

[jejones]

Yes, but you can't blame dmr for that.

Re:Not just the apps

[nedlohs]

That's completely false, please turn in your geek card.

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
        int class = 0;
        return class;
}

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).

Re:Not just the apps

[jejones]

Even if that were the case, it doesn't mean the compiled program will exhibit the same behavior:

#include

int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
        assert(sizeof('a') == sizeof(int));
        return 0;
}

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:Not just the apps

[GauteL]

"Most of the work we do as developers is string manipulation."

Perhaps most of the work YOU do as a developer is String manipulation. But that does not necessarily apply to everyone. As for C-strings being poor, Ritchie and other C-developers made most of their design decisions for a reason. Strings as we know them now, i.e. C++ std::string, MFC CString, QString, etc. were not a realistic alternative when C was developed and the actual realistic alternatives, i.e. Pascal strings, had their own drawbacks (fixed length).

Re:Not just the apps

[TheRaven64]

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.

To put this in perspective:

The Xerox Alto ran Smalltalk. It ran a VM, which was written in a static subset of Smalltalk that was natively compiled, and the rest of the code was interpreted bytecode from a dynamic, object-oriented language, including a GUI, an introspective development environment, and some apps. It required a microcoded BitBlt instruction to be able to achieve a usable speed. This was on a processor that didn't even reach 1MHz, with half a meg of RAM.

Objective-C was created in 1986 because the processor and memory requirements of Smalltalk were deemed unreasonably high.

Re:Not just the apps

[Dogun]

Native code in Windows is mostly written in both C and C++, in that you will see both .c and .cpp files, but since all DLL interfaces in Windows are C interfaces (C++ interfaces basically require you to be using the same compiler, though you can use COM to wrap C++ classes to build portable OO interfaces), even the .cpp files tend to be more C-like than C++-like.

There are C++ developers at Microsoft who do very ninja C++ things. But for the most part, people using .cpp files might as well be using C - many people just use .cpp so that they can declare variables in the middle of a scope. Some people have a class they internally use to do state management or implement some algorithm.

Basically, the common reason for use of .cpp is to get language features that increase readability. Very little in richly decorated in C++-but-not-COM faces outward, even in small internal components. I won't say none, because I never conducted an audit to check.

Source: me, worked in Windows for 4 years and change.

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

[TheRaven64]

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

I doubt it. Most of what he created was part of the 'worse is better' philosophy. Given the choice between C and Algol, most people would have picked Algol in the '80s, but C compilers were cheaper (or free), so they went with C. The same with UNIX. There were much better operating systems around, but they were either expensive, required expensive hardware or, in many cases, both. C and UNIX were both good enough and free. That usually beats really good and expensive. If they'd tried to make a large profit from either, they'd have failed. In fact, the BSD lawsuit (AT&T vs UCB) came close to killing UNIX.

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

[JAlexoi]

Sorry, but ALGOL is just as awful as Pascal for an engineer. It's a freaking language developed by academics for developers. C on the other hand was the language by developers for developers. Obviously academics chose what's best for them, thus Pascal still survives...

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.

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:And no patents

[c 0xFF]

I mostly agree, but a quick rebuttal:

The declaration syntax is only horrid when you need to declare something complex. "int i;" is about as simple as you could ever expect a declaration to be, and 99% of all variables fall along those lines. It's the rare cases of declaring arrays of function pointers returning pointers to arrays of function pointer-pointers (throwing in const in a few places for good measure) that get to be horrid.

Another important thing to remember is that C only tries to lightly abstract away from assembly language. The abstraction is just enough that you don't generally care about the machine itself. That's why arrays and pointers work they way they do. That's why there's so much "implementation-defined behavior" and other undefined cases. Writing a functional C compiler is so simple, as most constructs can be translated directly into equivalent assembly.

Well, at least, that's the way C was when it first came out. Then it spread and grew, was modified, extended, and eventually standardized. A lot of that simplicity has gone away in the decades since, as a natural by-product of the growth of the language. Now, in comparison to some other languages, C is arcane, awkward, and complicated. C used to be dead simple, which is why it's deceptively simple now.

But if you step back, there's a certain simplistic beauty that exists, even to this day.

RIP

[neo12]

main()
{
    printf("Goodbye, World");
}

-RIP dmr

I have nothing intelligent to post

[Windwraith]

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

Re:I have nothing intelligent to post

[5hoom]

Totally. The 'nixes & C are incredibly huge contributions to our technology filled world. This guy gave us so much of what we take for granted every day. Rest in peace.

Less than 10 comments for Ritchie?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this world full of morons?

One of the fathers of the modern computing operating sistem, co-creator of C and UNIX, and less than 10 comments?

People is sick.

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.

Rest in Peace

[forgot_my_username]

I never met the man, but he was central to my love of computers.


printf("Hello, Heaven");

To me this is for more significant than the passing of Mr. Jobs.

Goodby and thank you, sir

[Uthic]

Always had a great respect for him for making C and UNIX. I guess it's early in the day, but way less comments than I was expecting for news like this.

Re:RIP

[KiloByte]

It's K&R, not ANSI.

Re:RIP

[elashish14]

Don't forget the linebreak.

I always forget the linebreak.

now *that* is a loss to the IT Community :/

[sammyF70]

Here is a clip of Ritchie explaining Unix (although I ~knew~ him mostly through his work on C)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7FjX7r5icV8

One of the Great Ones has passed

[rkhalloran]

Without the work of dmr and the rest of the 1127 group at Bell Labs, the computing landscape we take for granted would be radically different, and many of us would be in other lines of work.

UNIX isn't the perfect OS, but it does better, in more environments, than anything else out there. Jobs and Torvalds would have very different lives if not for the work Ritchie did.

Requiescat in pace, dmr.

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

My memory of Dennis Ritchie

[bsDaemon]

I started learning C on FreeBSD 2.2.8 when I was in the 8th grade. In 9th grade, the internet was still a much wilder place than it is today, and felt a lot friendlier and smaller. As such, I didn't really see anything wrong with emailing random "public figures" to ask them questions. Of course, some didn't respond, some were rude assholes (Linus, I'm looking at you...), but some were truly amazing. In the amazing category would be Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, both of whom would answer my emails promptly and regularly. I corresponded with both of them for the better part of a year and a half, before doing things like getting a girl friend. Both Ken and Dennis were more than happy to hep me out with questions, give me advice and steer me in the right direction.

I wish I still had those emails but, alas, I don't. Of all the digital "property" I wish I had never lost, those emails are pretty much the only thing on the list. I don't know where I would be in life, or what I would be doing, if it weren't for the work they did and their guidance when I was younger. Dennis might be the first "famous" person that I've ever felt like the world was poorer in some way for losing.

Re:My memory of Dennis Ritchie

[Abalamahalamatandra]

My story goes back a bit further, I think. In 1985-6, I was a senior in High School and already a massive computer geek. My senior year school day consisted of a math class, an English class, and the rest of the day was spent in the computer lab. We mostly played on TRS-80 Model 4's but also enjoyed running a DEC PDP-8 which had 2K of core memory, two 512K drum drives the size of refrigerators, a Teletype printer console, and a bunch of whirring DECtape drives. Unfortunately it didn't run Unix, it ran RSTS/8. Unix had to wait a couple of years for accounts on VAXen and Sequent boxes.

Anyway, I'd already pounded through BASIC, Fortran and Pascal as well as Z-80 Assembler, so the computer teacher was pretty much done. A friend and I pitched the idea of working together on a self-study course in C and got approval, so a good amount of that lab time was spent with just about the only book on C there was back then - the "K&R C Book" called "The C Programming Language". To this day, I consider learning C to be my real, proper introduction to the world of computing, and I'm still here almost exactly 25 years later.

I still have that copy of the book, and inside it are all the printouts of my HS programming time including the C programs I loved writing the best. Once a year or so I look them over again to remember simpler times when "hacking" meant writing some neat C or assembly code that was as small and/or powerful as possible.

Thanks, Dennis (and Brian!), it's been a good trip so far. Rest in peace.

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.

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

A Different Life

[Bucc5062]

I never met the man, but it was his code that shaped the rest of my life. In 1978 I entered college to be a physicist. When I discovered I had to actually understand Calculus to get past the basics of physics, I found my way over to the computer lab. There I ran my first program, but as a consumer, not a creator. I was amazed and had to know how the program worked so I went to see the head of the department. The next day I signed up for CS101 for the next semester.

the Head of Comp Sci, just the year before had decided to radically change the direction of the CompSci program from understanding/learning the mainframe world to the emerging mini computers. Out when IBM and in came DEC PDP/11. Out went COBOL, in came C, RATFOR, FORTRAN, and Pascal along with assembler. My first Comp Sci book was K&R and I referenced that book for years. I'll grant he shaped the world, but he did it one programmer at a time. My variation:

Void Main() {
        printf("Thank You Richie, from The World");
}

(for those noting that he has not gotten any major press, that is the difference between creation and marketing. Jobs was marketing magician, and very good at his job. Folks like Woz, Richie, Tim Patterson, these creators were the foundations which allowed minds like Jobs or Gates to exist. Their drive was not on attention, but creation. Today's media has little time on depth so they just follow the rule, sex sells and the creator of a programming language is not sexy, the king of marketing shiny devices that do fun things, he's sexy)

Re:He isn't dead

[Vanders]

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

Goodbye

[Compulawyer]

#include

int main()

{

printf("Goodbye Dennis and thanks for all the code!");

}

Dennis Ritchie Memorial Haiku

[undulato]

Ritchie, your slim book; and a headful of pointers; to yet more pointers.

Re:He was an atheist

[MrSmith0011000100110]

Pfffff only Apple fanboi's think they're going to live on top of the cloud.

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.

Re:The guy who supplies the guy who supplies the..

[justforgetme]

Talk about living on, through his work...
in no particular order:
Book(s), OSs, programing languages....

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Richie > Jobs .

[Thud457]

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

Stuff that matters

[Torodung]

Now this matters. Goodbye and well done.

Re:Richie Jobs .

[shutdown -p now]

Heck, Ritchie was one hell of a giant - it's easier to name people famous in IT who didn't stand on his shoulders. Come to think of it, if you restrict yourself to the last 30 years or so, it'll probably be an empty set.