RIP dmr

Felt compelled to write a quick post about the late Dennis Ritchie, who, it was announced earlier, sadly passed away at the weekend.

That’s him in the header pic, on the right, with collaborator Ken Thompson, at a PDP-11 (pic via nushackers.org), and though he won’t get the recognition, he deserves at least as much as Steve Jobs, because he was every bit as influential upon Computing as Jobs ever was, and it’s sad that we’ve lost two of the greats in the same month.

The key headlines for why you should give a damn about this great man are probably C and its derivatives, K&R, and UNIX:

• C is a nearly forty-year old programming language that’s still in wide use today, it’s that good.  You probably use software, and even firmware, written in C (or a derivative language, such as the object-orientated C++) all the time without realising it.  Even if you somehow don’t, modern high-level computing languages all owe a huge debt to C.
• K&R is the definitive book on C.  It’s as old as me, I own a copy, and so does pretty much every single person who ever learned to code in C.  Concise, but brilliant.  Probably the best selling programming book ever.  I’d be willing to bet at least as many people have read this as have read Harry Potter or Twilight, to put that into some context, and it’s played a much more deeply influential role in all our lives than either of those novels, defining how this hugely important language has been used ever since, as well as influencing the development of all programming languages and conventions that followed.  Here’s a candlelight vigil by a copy, if you don’t believe a programming book could be that important to anyone:
  
  
• UNIX.  The daddy of all pretty much modern operating systems that aren’t Windows.  Co-developed by Ritchie, along with Thompson, Kernighan, McIlroy and Ossanna at Bell Labs at the end of the 60’s and the start of the 70’s.  In constant development, redevelopment, and cloning ever since.  Tumblr is running on Linux servers, which is a Unix-like system (i.e. a clone, designed to interact like a Unix, and owing a big chunk of its architecture to Ritchie’s design as a consequence).  I’m posting this from a laptop running another type of Linux.  Linux has only made marginal inroads into desktop/laptop computers (currently about 5%, globally) but it’s running the majority of webservers (also Twitter and Google, to mention a couple), and any Android device (of which there’s now more than any other type of mobile device, including the iPhone) is also running a version of Linux.  While we’re talking Apple though, all versions of OS X are also Unix-like, and since iOS is derived from OSX, the iPhones, iPad and iPod Touch are all also running an OS with Dennis Ritchie’s fingerprints all over its heart.  Let me say that again, just so we’re clear; all Apple portable devices running iOS, all Apple computers from the past decade, all Android devices, the majority of webservers, and a decent number of other devices out there are all running operating systems (not to mention software) that rely heavily upon Ritchie’s work.

The guy was not as flashy as Steve Jobs, not as rich, not as well-known outside of nerd circles, but he was every bit as important not just to Computing, but to the world.  His legacy will live on for a very long time, my thoughts are with those close to him, and I hope he rests in peace.