• One great man less :(

    by  • October 13, 2011 • Common, Developers, Users • 4 Comments

    Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie died at home this weekend.

    Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie

    As the creator of the C programming language and one of the main developers of Unix, he impacted the life of me and other developers a lot.

    Even today, 30 years after their initial creation, many people work on Unix like systems (like Linux or Mac OS) and develop in (Objective) C(++).

    For me C was one of my starting languages for my real programming work and even today I analyze the whole day software written in C for embedded systems that control our modern world, be it the flight control of airplanes or engine control of cars.

    Without his initial ideas and work, today there would be no Linux kernel, no Mac OS, …

    We all owe him a lot. He changed the world.

    Thanks for your great inventions! You won’t be forgotten.

    Just two impressive Ritchie cites:

    “Unix is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius – or at any rate a programmer – to understand and appreciate the simplicity.”

    “The greatest danger to good computer science research today may be excessive relevance. If we can keep alive enough openess to new ideas, enough freedom of communication, enough patience to allow the novel to prosper, it will remain possible for a future Ken Thompson to find a little-used Cray/1 computer and fashion a system as creative, and as influential, as Unix.”

    About

    Dr.-Ing. Christoph Cullmann is a Senior Software Engineer at AbsInt Angewandte Informatik GmbH. His work is focused on static analysis of both binary and source programs and the WCET analysis of embedded systems. In his spare time, he works on the KDE project and maintains the Kate editor application and component.

    http://cullmann.io/

    4 Responses to One great man less :(

    1. yoda
      October 14, 2011 at 10:48

      Real “edison of the era” died and he will not receive even a 0.01% of attention that Jobs death caused…

      Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie we salute you.

      Reply
    2. JanKusanagi
      October 16, 2011 at 16:35

      RIP Dennis Ritchie, your legacy is huge. Thanks for everything.

      Reply
    3. Melle
      November 12, 2011 at 23:26

      Rest in peace, Dennis Ritchie.
      You changed the world. More than anyone.

      Reply
    4. Shawn
      November 17, 2011 at 17:36

      Next time I use a unix, bsd, linux, mac or other system based on unix I will definently think of this… It is amazing how far something can progress within the initial base creators lifetime.

      Reply