Just over a week after Steve Jobs died, another extremely significant figure in the world of computing has died. Dennis Ritchie was the creator of the C programming language and a contributor to the creation of the Unix operating system. C (and its immediate successor, C++) is probably the most popular programming language of the 20th century, and has to be among the top five, so far, of the 21st. Unix (in various flavors) was the most common operating system for servers (that is, computers on which the web runs) in the 20th century and among the top three, so far, of the 21st, and is the basis of Apple’s OS X. He was also the co-author of the first book on C, The C Programming Language, known amongst geeks worldwide as “K&R” after its authors Brian Kernighan and Ritchie. My first-edition copy is still in the go-to-first section of my reference bookshelf.
So, putting it another way: Dennis Ritchie created some of the tools that were used for most of the advances in computing over the last 30 years. He won’t get the posthumous press coverage that Steve Jobs received, but what Apple has done was made possible in part by what Dennis Ritchie did.
UPDATE: there’s a good piece about Ritchie here. (Thanks to Eric Brombaugh for bringing this to my attention.)
