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

[ericvids]

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

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

RIP

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.

stdout

[Anonymous Coward]

goodbye world

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

[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.

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: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.

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:Not just the apps

[jejones]

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

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: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'.