Steve Jobs received a lot of press last week, but Dennis Ritchie's work in programming languages and operating systems paved the way for things as we know them today. His work in code made it possible for Jobs and Gates (and the rest of us) to do their thing.
Sean Gallagher, Ars Technica
Linus Torvalds once said, in reference to the development of Linux, that he ?had hoisted [himself] up on the shoulders of giants.? Among those giants, Dennis Ritchie (aka dmr) was likely the tallest. Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system passed away on October 8 at the age of 70, leaving a legacy that casts a very long shadow.
I got my start with technology because of Ritchie?s work on the Unix GENIE time-share system. It made it possible for my high school to time-share the PDP-11 at SUNY-Stony Brook?the same model computer that Ritchie, Kenneth Thompson and their team used to create Unix?and for me to write my first lines of code on a DECwriter II TTY terminal.
arstechnica
But Ritchie?s C is even more important, in many ways, than Unix. It is the fundamental building block upon which much of what we consider to be the modern world was built.
Ritchie didn?t invent the curly-bracket syntax?that came from Martin Richards? BCPL. But the C programming language, which he called ?quirky, flawed, and an enormous success,? is the basis of nearly every programming and scripting tool, whether they use elements of C?s syntax or not. Java, JavaScript, Objective C and Cocoa, Python, Perl, and PHP would not exist without dmr?s C. Every bit of software that makes it possible for you to read this page has a trace of dmr?s DNA in it.
Read the full article at Wired
