R.I.P. Dennis Ritchie

[KeepItSimpleStupid]

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/280086/dennis-ritchie-rip-john-derbyshire

 

[Electroenthusiast]

RIP Dennis Ritchie
It's been 3 Days! And no news abt it.

 

[squishy36]

It was on the usual news sources I look at every morning. But I've been a bit surprised at the lack of publicity; Ritchie's work was far more influential on the world than Steve Jobs', at least in my opinion -- yet there were orders of magnitudes difference in the publicity of the deaths.

Personally, I consider the invention and growth of use of the C language as the biggest single contribution to computer science, ever. The reason isn't because of any significant deep technical innovation, but that it was exactly the right design at the right time. It was a language designed to do a nice job of abstracting the processor and hardware, but still be close enough to the hardware to be efficient. It was also designed to be relatively easy for compiler writers to write a compiler for it. And it didn't hurt that it was heavily used in the UNIX operating system, whose popularity really helped to spread the influence of C.

I don't think anyone would underestimate the importance of C -- it's still used everywhere today even though there are fancier languages with more sophisticated bells and whistles. So many operating systems and computer tools have been written in it. And, it's a nice design of the language -- it's a small language as attested to by the size of the K&R book, yet the real power is in the humongous number of libraries that have been produced (that was another part of the design).

So my hat's off to Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, and the others at Bell Labs who did this pioneering work that changed the world.

 

[KeepItSimpleStupid]

Very efficient, but a programmer can render it unintelligible.

My first program using it was an OS and machine emulator.

 

[squishy36]

Very efficient, but a programmer can render it unintelligible.

That's true with ANY language. I used to work as a firmware engineer for a large corporation on a big product you've all heard of and likely used. It was about a million lines of C code and was some of the worst code I've ever seen in my career. But it generated billions of dollars of revenue (and, fortunately, about 12 years ago it was re-architected into a much better form).

 

[Jugurtha]

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)

{
printf("Rest In Peace, Dennis...\n");
return 0; //Just for the sake of having good habits.

}

 

[BrownOut]

Ah, the geeks ruled the end of the last millinium! We shall be forever in their debt. RIP Dennis.