Dennis Ritchie Has Died

[Raiser]

Shadowed by Steve Jobs, the tech world seems to have missed the death of Dennis Ritchie (1941-2011). The American computer scientist is known for his role in developing the Unix OS, and was the father of the C programming language, along with Ken Thompson.

Ritchie passed away on the weekend of October 8th, battling an unspecified illness. The news of the death of the 70-year-old was first broken on Google+ by Robert C. Pike, a Canadian software engineer and author, and a close friend.

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie co-authored the definitive book on C, "The C Programming Language", commonly referred to as K&R (in reference to the authors Kernighan and Ritchie). He led a private and secluded life, after his retirement in 2007 as head of Lucent Technologies' System Software Research Department.

Ritchie received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998 for the development of the 'C' programming language and for co-development of the UNIX operating system during his tenure at Bell Labs.

In the decades since 1970, Unix would go on to stamp its dominance in the world of super-computers, mainframes and workstations. You can count among its various avatars and architecturally derivative operative systems, the Unix servers of just about every enterprise-level provider, the minix OS studied by every Computer Science student, FreeBSD and its ilk inspired by the free-software philosophy, the uber-cool Apple Mac OS X itself, the Linux OS seen on desktops, and currently-hot Android OS on mobile phones and tablets.

"Ritchie's influence rivals Jobs'; it's just less visible," was a Twitter post by James Grimmelman, associate professor at New York Law School. "His pointer has been cast to void *; his process has terminated with exit code 0."

Source

EDIT: Formatting error.

 

[Mazor]

The implication that the "the tech world seems to have missed" this is bullshit, it's been posted all over the "tech world" already. It's those not very involved in or actually completely outside of the tech world that have missed it. This is not hard to understand, because unlike Jobs' work, you can't physically hold Ritchie's in your hand the same way.

The interesting part is that not only is OS X and iOS based on Ritchie's operating system, virtually all software running on them is either directly or through a high level abstraction layer written in Ritchie's programming language.

Despite the key difference that Jobs was still in every way active whereas Ritchie wasn't, the death of the latter is a lot more significant to me personally. Even though I doubt it is the case, it would be interesting to hear if any other gbatemp member thinks the same way. (Shieldon: Note that I don't in any way think that Jobs\ work was insignificant and am aware that he's done a lot more than merely basing stuff on Ritchies work.)

 

[camurso_]

#include 
main()
{
printf ("Goodbye World\n");
}

 

[The Catboy]

The Catboy just sad faced D:
This is sad news indeed.

 

[Ace]

RIP to Mr. Ritchie. His work will forever be appreciated and used by programmers worldwide, as long as nothing better than C comes up.

 

[notmeanymore]

D: Let's hope there won't be a third.

 

[Ace]

D: Let's hope there won't be a third.

Are you talking about Gates? Oh lawd no.....

 

[notmeanymore]

D: Let's hope there won't be a third.

Are you talking about Gates? Oh lawd no.....

If not him then someone like Linus Torvalds.

 

[iFish]

This isn't a good month to be a big person in the computer industry... :\

Oh well, this is sad news. I think it's safe to say anybody who uses a computer daily, uses something he helped creat. Might it be a program wirren in C or something like C++, Obj-C, etc. or, using an OS based off UNIX.

RIP

 

[Hop2089]

I think there's a bad omen to all of these tech founders and co-founders dying, or is it me.

Anyway RIP

 

[Mbmax]

/me have no words.

Feel so sad those days ...

RIP dmr.

 

[Qtis]

This has been a sad month indeed. RIP.


-Qtis

 

[TheDarkSeed]

That is sad. The guy has done so much for programming. His work will live on in a lot of the tech we see today.

 

[golden]

Damn, what is up with this month. It's like "tech gods dying" month or something. This is crazy, I hope we don't have to read about anything similar anytime again. This has not been a good October for human technology.

 

[jonthedit]

Omg... Not another tech god dying...
It's almost as if there is a god.

 

[Nimbus]

*Removes hat*

RIP Dennis Ritchie. I hope you took great solstace in knowing you have created one of the most common programing languages, and being the Co-Creator of the Unix OS. Without you, GNU/Linux, and alot of other things probably wouldn't exist today, at least not in the form they are in.

You deserve more attention than Steve Jobs does personally.