The world has lost two geniuses in the past week:
Last week, Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple died of pancreatic cancer on Wednesday (October 5, 2011).
Over the weekend another lower key technology genius passed away, Dennis Ritchie, aka dmr. He was 70 and passed away after a long illness, reportedly of prostate cancer and heart disease, on Saturday (October 8, 2011).
Steve was the guy who brought the world Apple computers, iPod - 2001, iTunes - 2003, iPhone - 2007, App Store - 2008, and iPad - 2010.
However, none of that would have been possible without Dennis Ritchie. He was the founder of the C programming language along with being a key developer of Unix. Unix is the operating system that all of Steve Job's creations are built upon. Without Unix, there would be no Apple.
C is the programming language used to create Unix. It's also the language the majority of the web is based on. C++, Java, PHP are all based on C. Without C, programmers wouldn't have a job, the web, smartphones wouldn't exist. C is the founding father of programming languages.
C was the first language I learned when fate turned me from a math major into a programmer. Without it, I wouldn't be able to work at home.
Kernighan & Ritchie - The C Programming Language is the C bible Dennis Ritchie helped write and is a standard in a programmer's library.
It's too bad Dennis Ritchie won't be mourned by the millions mourning Steve Jobs. A Google search for Steve Jobs turns up 46,900,000 results. A Google search for Dennis Ritchie turns up 61,200 results. Truly sad. Steve Jobs was the face everyone knew, but Dennis Ritchie was the unseen guy in the back office making it all possible. RIP Dennis Ritchie...
#include "stdafx.h"
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
printf("Goodbye World!\n");
return 0;
}
More Dennis Ritchie
No comments:
Post a Comment