f13.net forums - Dennis Ritchie R.I.P.

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July 18, 2025, 07:15:51 AM

we're back, baby

Dennis Ritchie, creator the C programming language and co-creator of the UNIX operating system apparently passed away over the weekend according to Rob Pike, a friend and collaborator.

Bad couple months for Silicon Valley and/or tech pioneers. Jobs, dmr, Ken Oshman, Julius Blank...

Our first-generation geeks are hitting their late 50's, early 60's, and this is not a demographic that took care of their health.

--Dave (when I first learned C, it was Kernigan-Ritchie C, because that was the only version that wasn't locked up as proprietary)

RIP DMR

The C Programming Language by Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan is absolutely the greatest programming text ever, one that set the standard for the industry — that few thereafter have even come close to approximating in eloquence and succinctness.

I realize he’s not a well known figure like Steve Jobs, but arguably his influence on computing may have been greater.

Also, see Tim Bray’s wonderful eulogy.

:(

Quote from: naum on October 12, 2011, 09:59:26 PM

I realize he’s not a well known figure like Steve Jobs, but arguably his influence on computing may have been greater.

Let's not kid ourselves. Steve Jobs is a much loved wanker, this guy made it happen.

dmr created the two key technologies (the C programming language and UNIX) that have defined my career as a systems/OS engineer and are the tools that modern computing is built upon.

Between iOS and Android, UNIX derived platforms are dominating mobile.

Linux *is* the Internet on the server side for all practical purposes, and the face of cluster computing and supercomputing today.

Inspired-by-C's-syntax languages like C++, Java, Javascript, and C# are a huge part of modern programming, and C remains *the* systems language in which the bulk of modern OSes are written.

Steve gave us some very shiny products. Dennis give us the tools to make those products possible.

Dennis was a giant. I don't need to diminish the contributions of others to say so.

Most of my day to day involves Java or grails or the rest of that crap. But if I need to do some real number crunching? Back to C. Thanks Dennis for making all of the toys doable.

Actually, Rob Pike says it better than I could:
https://plus.google.com/u/2/101960720994009339267

Quote from: Rob Pike

I was warmly surprised to see how many people responded to my Google+ post about Dennis Ritchie's untimely passing. His influence on the technical community was vast, and it's gratifying to see it recognized. When Steve Jobs died there was a wide lament - and well-deserved it was - but it's worth noting that the resurgence of Apple depended a great deal on Dennis's work with C and Unix.

The C programming language is quite old now, but still active and still very much in use. The Unix and Linux (and Mac OS X and I think even Windows) kernels are all C programs. The web browsers and major web servers are all in C or C++, and almost all of the rest of the Internet ecosystem is in C or a C-derived language (C++, Java), or a language whose implementation is in C or a C-derived language (Python, Ruby, etc.). C is also a common implementation language for network firmware. And on and on.

And that's just C.

Dennis was also half of the team that created Unix (the other half being Ken Thompson), which in some form or other (I include Linux) runs all the machines at Google's data centers and probably at most other server farms. Most web servers run above Unix kernels; most non-Microsoft web browsers run above Unix kernels in some form, even in many phones.

And speaking of phones, the software that runs the phone network is largely written in C.

But wait, there's more.

In the late 1970s, Dennis joined with Steve Johnson to port Unix to the Interdata. From this remove it's hard to see how radical the idea of a portable operating system was; back then OSes were mostly written in assembly language and were tightly coupled, both technically and by marketing, to specific computer brands. Unix, in the unusual (although not unique) position of being written in a "high-level language", could be made to run on a machine other than the PDP-11. Dennis and Steve seized the opportunity, and by the early 1980s, Unix had been ported by the not-yet-so-called open source community to essentially every mini-computer out there. That meant that if I wrote my program in C, it could run on almost every mini-computer out there. All of a sudden, the coupling between hardware and operating system was broken. Unix was the great equalizer, the driving force of the Nerd Spring that liberated programming from the grip of hardware manufacturers.

The hardware didn't matter any more, since it all ran Unix. And since it didn't matter, hardware fought with other hardware for dominance; the software was a given. Windows obviously played a role in the rise of the x86, but the Unix folks just capitalized on that. Cheap hardware meant cheap Unix installations; we all won. All that network development that started in the mid-80s happened on Unix, because that was the environment where the stuff that really mattered was done. If Unix hadn't been ported to the Interdata, the Internet, if it even existed, would be a very different place today.

I read in an obituary of Steve Jobs that Tim Berners-Lee did the first WWW development on a NeXT box, created by Jobs's company at the time. Well, you know what operating system ran on NeXTs, and what language.

Even in his modest way, I believe Dennis was very proud of his legacy. And rightfully so: few achieve a fraction as much.

So long, Dennis, and thanks for all the magic.

*pours a Mountain Dew*

My manager worked with Ritchie back in the day. She was a bit shocked to hear he had passed.

Between him and Steve Jobs both dying this year I'm starting to suspect something it up. If Gates dies this years then I'll something is. Or if he doesn't but then several other big name computer industry guys do then I'll have even a better idea of what is up.

John McCarthy, the father of AI, just died, does that count?

It is odd to me that I started back to school for programming earlier this year, then all these great people start passing on. Makes me wish I would have started sooner and maybe see what these folks were up to when alive.