Dennis Ritchie is being remembered today as a pioneering computer scientist, the "father of [the] C programming language," co-creator of the Unix operating system and "a 'titan' of the [computer] industry whose influence was largely unknown."
Ritchie, 70, has died. The news was confirmed this morning by Alcatel-Lucent, which owns the Bell Labs where Ritchie worked from 1967 until his retirement in 2007.
ZDnet writes that:
"While the introduction of Intel's 4004 microprocessor in 1971 is widely regarded as a key moment in modern computing, the contemporaneous birth of the C programming language is less well known. Yet the creation of C has as much claim, if not more, to be the true seminal moment of IT as we know it; it sits at the heart of programming — and in the hearts of programmers — as the quintessential expression of coding elegance, power, simplicity and portability."
It adds that "Ritchie designed a computer language, C, that could be quickly and easily moved between different hardware. Programs that were written in C, provided they followed the rules, would then run with little or no modification on any computer that could itself run C."
Then Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson "rewrote Unix in C, giving the operating system the same ease of portability. Programmers could then learn one operating system, one set of tools and one language, and find those skills nearly universally applicable."
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