Dennis Ritchie, the Father of C, passed away a few days ago. A friend asked me today, “Would we have had a Steve Jobs without first having a Dennis Ritchie?” He made a great point. The most common programming language for the Apple platform today is Objective-C. Mr. Ritchie was not an attention hound it seems. I doubt more than 1% of the people who know who Steve Jobs is would know who Dennis Ritchie is, and yet, we in this business of programming owe him a great debt of gratitude.

I know there are C detractors, but the ubiquity of C and all it’s descendants cannot be denied. Andrew Binstock, in his column today on Dr. Dobbs, quoted Mr. Ritchie as having said:

“C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success. [And UNIX] is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity.” ~Dennis Ritchie

Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention he was also deeply involved in developing UNIX. And how many derivatives of UNIX are there? And how many other operating systems at their core are so like UNIX as to make the grand old operating system the true grandfather or at least uncle of every seriously utilized operating system in the world?

I will end by borrowing Mr. Binstock’s conclusion:

“Ritchie saw in language what others could not see, in operating system what others had not built, and in the world around him what others did not realize. His insight and the elegance of his work will be missed by all programmers, even in future generations who, as he would want it, might know nothing of him.” ~Andrew Binstock

Thanks, Dennis Ritchie. Thanks for C. And thanks for UNIX.

And whatever you do, don’t miss this farewell from MuppetLabs. Thanks for sharing it, Dave.