Remembering Dennis Ritchie

Jason Perlow over at ZD Net has a nice piece on Dennis Ritchie. Ritchie died a four years ago, about the same time as Steve Jobs. Everyone knows who Jobs was but most of the population—and sadly, some of our community’s younger members—don’t know who Ritchie was.

As Perlow recounts, almost none of modern computing would exist today if it weren’t for Ritchie’s work. Although his contributions were legion, he is mainly remembered as the inventor of C and the co-inventor of Unix.

It’s hard to overestimate either. Although many who haven’t bothered to learn it like to mock it as a latter day COBOL, C is, in fact, behind almost all the important software we use. Even “modern” languages like Python and Ruby take inspiration and syntax from C and are implemented in it. If you’re a Unix or Linux user, your operating system is written in it. If you’re a Windows user, your operating system is written in C’s unlovely child, C++. If you worship at the Church of Apple, your operating system is written in another C derivative, Objective C.

One of the most important contributions of C was to provide a portable systems language. Before C, almost all system software was written in the assembly language of the host machine. It was C that made Unix a portable operating system that ran on multiple hardware platforms. None of this would be possible without Ritchie’s C.

Unix, of course, has been so successful that Rob Pike once gave a talk bemoaning the fact that it had essentially killed operating system research. Even Windows, its archenemy for many years, has incorporated large parts of Unix. Today Unix is seen mostly on big iron providing back end processing but it lives on in smaller machines in the form of Linux. These days, any youngster can get a cheap computer, put Linux on it, and have a world class computing environment. At the same time Linux is powering much of the Internet so Unix’s influence extends to all of modern computing. Again, none of this would have been possible without Dennis Ritchie’s work.

Before he died, Ritchie was always adding interesting things to his Bell Labs Home Page—which Bell Labs still maintains—and I remembering checking it regularly for his latest offerings. Give Perlow’s article a look and celebrate one of computing’s heroes.

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