Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of the programming language C and the co-inventor of the UNIX operating system has shuffled off this mortal coil. His contributions to contemporary computing are so far reaching that his work has branched into almost every conceivable human endeavor dealing with computational technology. He died on October 8 at the age of 70, leaving behind a legacy of computer code, algorithms, and heuristics that blanket the modern world.
In high school—back when I was a baby programmer—I recall arguments with other students about the merits of Pascal vs. C; they often became quite heated, much to my surprise, since it seemed obvious to me that C had to be the superior language. Once I joined the workforce and started an internship with Motorola my bosses chuckled when they heard that other students argued for Pascal. “We do everything in C,” they said. “Nothing else will do on UNIX systems as the industry standard.”
In college, one of my professors who taught Programming Languages, Engineering and Philosophy had been part of the invention of ALGOL 60. I have to admit that I have a crush on Ada Lovelace and I learned the language named after her not just because I wanted a job at NASA; but out of solidarity to a first-ever programmer.
Since then, every project I have worked on has had some influence from the C-family of programming languages. C++, Java, C#, Python, Perl, and even PHP all take their direction from this first-of-great-languages and the power of its syntax forward into what programmers build onto a vast variety of platforms from gigantic mainframes, to cloud-clusters computing with Hadoop, to mobile devices, and even embedded chips that do simple tasks.
If you want to know why C and its progeny has dominated the past 40 years of computer technology you should hear it form the patriarch of the language itself in an interview from 2000 with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling.
In many ways, the foundation that Ritchie built for us has become the stable place in the ever-shifting ocean of the cyberworld and computer technology where we stand upon the shoulders of giants—and he is oh-so-giant.
We salute him. The father of C and UNIX, the grandfather of Linux, and a great ancestor of some many trillions of lines of code that pay homage to his genius.
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