OT: Another giant passes....

[572cv]

Some of you in the programming biz (I'm not) are already aware of this, but all of us have been affected by the work of Dennis Ritchie, who passed away today. He wrote the C programming language, and UNIX, the underpinnings of, for example, the Apple OS, and so much more. What Ritchie conceived, and Steve Jobs and Co made accessible to ordinary humans (I'm in that group), has been monumental. Given the recent passing of Steve Jobs, it seemed in context to note this additional passing to this thoughtful group.

http://isc.sans.org/diary/Dennis+M+Ritchie+1941+-+2011+/11806

[stephenmarklay]

I remember hearing that name a lot during my college years taking comp sci classes.

[MadRocketSci]

Everyone who can program in C has Kernighan and Ritchie, aka the bible...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language

[bagochips3]

Thanks for posting this. Indeed a giant whose contributions affected most (even though they may not realize it). A great loss.

[benb]

I have 2 copies of his "C Programming languge" book. One is a very old, maybe first edition copy that belonged to my dad, second is a modern one i had purchased.

You can probably argue his contributions are even more important then Jobs' as he contributed the base of almost anything you can get your hands on today.

[johnnymossville]

My brother worked with him at Lucent in NJ until Dennis retired about 5 or so years ago I guess. The era he came from (Particularly Bell Labs) must have been an exciting time for programmers and engineers. RIP Mr. Ritchie.

[rice rocket]

Wow, wrote C when he was in his late 20's/early 30's. What a brilliant mind. RIP.

[alancw3]

wow! thanks for sharing this with us. i had no idea. i learned something today! :-)

[R2D2]

Sorry to hear of his passing. C was just as important as Jobs using the Motorola 68000 versus the Intel 8080. Makes me long for the days when the field was wide open with new innovations.

Sadly software has been become pretty stagnant other then 4G network delivery of apps.