Dennis Ritchie dead

[Monster]

Dennis Ritchie, (co-)inventor of the C programming language and UNIX, apparently died.

Rob Pike said on Google+:

I just heard that, after a long illness, Dennis Ritchie (dmr) died at home this weekend. I have no more information.

I trust there are people here who will appreciate the reach of his contributions and mourn his passing appropriately.

He was a quiet and mostly private man, but he was also my friend, colleague, and collaborator, and the world has lost a truly great mind.

( Rob Pike Wiki )

LWN posted:

Via Rob Pike we learn that Dennis Ritchie has passed on. He laid the foundations for much of what we are doing now, and will be much missed.

SmoogeSpace writes:

2011-10-12


Thank you Dennis Ritchie

Today marks the passing of the pioneer of C and Unix, Dennis Ritchie is the R in K&R, the true C that many of us middle aged programmers grew up on. He helped author two of my need to find new copy books: The C Programming Language and UNIX Programming Manual. What I love about "The C Programming Language" was its conciseness. In this age of 400-1000 page tomes on languages, it covers pretty much everything you need to know in less than 200. If I ever write a programming language guide, I hope mine does not get longer than that.

Anyway thank you Dennis Ritchie, you have shaped my life in many ways. [Thankyou LWN for the heads up]

( notification via Fedora project start page )

• Stephen Smoogen: Thank you Dennis Ritchie
  Thu, 13 Oct 2011 03:13:39 +0000

 

[Monster]

I like especially one comment on the LWN article:

Posted Oct 13, 2011 5:51 UTC (Thu) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]
An *actual* technologist who *actually* changed the world with his creations.

 

[Monster]

Actually, it's pretty hard to imagine what the world would be like if Dennis Ritchie had never existed. Probably, IBM would dominate the industry with one of several of its operating systems. UNIX wouldn't have existed, nor would C or C++ have ever existed. Perhaps Bjarne Stroustrup would have created an OOP language based on Pascal. There'd be far fewer computer programs, b/c C and C++ enabled the creation of software with less effort than say with Pascal. Since the original Windows operating extension to DOS was written in Pascal, Windows would perhaps exist in a far different form. Also, embedded programming using C (or in more modern times, C++) enabled industries to put computer chips in everything. Without that, we'd probably have much fewer computer chips in things. Perhaps there'd have been an embedded version of TurboPascal, who knows.

And it's hard to imagine if the GNU project would've ever existed and what it would've looked like. Perhaps there'd be a free open-source clone of some IBM operating system (instead of a UNIX clone called GNU/Linux), and people would program in some Pascal-derived language.

Now, if Niklaus Wirth (who invented Pascal) also wouldn't have existed, things would look even worse ... we'd perhaps program in Algol, or something!

 

[Monster]

Slashdot thread with some interesting comments.

 

[Brandon]

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