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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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'.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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: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: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.

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.