Remembering Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Ritchie - IMHO the greatest programmer who ever lived and now sadly he is gone.

Dennis Ritchie, pioneer of C programming language and Unix, reported dead at age 70 -- Engadget

Dennis along with Brian Kernighan developed the C programming language, initially in order to port Unix to new hardware platforms.

The idea was to write a high level programming language that was still very lean and close to the metal. All that it required was a relative thin layer of machine code to have the compiler up and running. Then any operating system, written in C could be ported to a new platform in record time.

Not only did C work beautifully for this purpose and while its syntax was terse it was very clean and readable. It was also small enough to completely fit within your head and once you learned it you did not need reams of documentation in order to use it.

Just about every popular language today has borrowed large parts of their syntax from C. If you look at Java without the object oriented extensions it is indistinguishable from C.

I met Dennis once in the late 1980s at COMDEX, at a party that Microsoft organized one evening of the event. I will never forget that, Dennis was and still is one of my heroes.

Dennis' contribution to computing permeates the underpinning of most of the software in use today.

He was the Nicola Tesla of modern computing, responsible for laying much of the groundwork without getting much of, if any of the credit...

R.I.P. Dennis Ritchie,