It’s been a rough month for technologists. Yesterday, Dennis Ritchie died at the age of 70.
If you’re a programmer, and you don’t know who Ritchie is, you should, because his work has had a serious impact on your life. He’s the co-creator of UNIX, from which Linux, Mac OS X, and CellOS (the PS3 OS) are all descended, just to name a few. He literally wrote the book on C because he created the language. (The C Programming Language, cowritten with Brian Kernighan. Yeah, it’s that skinny little book gathering dust on your shelf because you’ve been too busy with all of those C++ books.) Even if you’re not a C programmer, if you use C++, Objective C, C#, Java, Python, Ruby, or even some shell scripting languages, you’re using a C descendant, or at least something heavily influenced by C. He played a very major part in shaping the computing world into what it is today.
Thank you for everything, Dennis Ritchie.