Dennis Ritchie | End of a life well lived, beginning of a legend


Dennis Ritchie, the father of the 'C' programming language and the co-designer of the venerable UNIX operating system, passed away on 8 Oct '11.
His death has not generated nearly the amount and rhetoric that Job's has... that's just sad, it should have.


 A snippet: 
  ...

“Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX,” Pike tells Wired. “The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel — that pretty much the entire Internet runs on — is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they’re not, they’re written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. And all of the network hardware running these programs I can almost guarantee were written in C.
“It’s really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did.”

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