Dennis Ritchie: The IT gaint

Linus Torvalds once said, referring to the development of Linux, which “raised [her] on the shoulders of giants.” Among these giants, Dennis Ritchie (also known as DMR) was probably the biggest. Ritchie, the creator of the programming language C and co-developer of the Unix operating system died on October 8 at the age of 70 years, leaving a legacy casts a long shadow.

I was able to begin engineering work because of Ritchie’s part-time Unix GENIE system. It allowed me to share a good time to high school with a PDP-11 at SUNY-Stony Brook, the same computer model, Ritchie, Ken Thompson and their team used to create a Unix-and for me to write my first line of code DECwriter II TTY terminal.

But Ritchie C is even more important, in many ways, like Unix, is a key element on which a large part of what was built in the modern world.

Ritchie did not invent the curly bracket syntax that BCPL by Martin Richards has come ‘. But the C programming language, which he called “a strange, incomplete, and the great success” is the foundation of almost every programming and scripting tools, whether or not to use the elements of C syntax, or not. Java, JavaScript, Objective C and Cocoa, Python, Perl and PHP does not exist without the C. The DMR right software, which allows you to read this page is no trace of DNA in the DMR.

Through the creation of C, Ritchie gave birth to the concept of open systems. C was developed so that they can port to any Unix machine, and for programs written on one platform (and the skills used for development) can be easily transferred to another.

In this way, Ritchie shaped our world a much more fundamental than Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. What distinguishes them is that he did not just seeking fame and fortune, but just by intellectual curiosity. Unix and C is a product of research basic research began as a side project with equipment purchased based on a promise that Ritchie and Thompson wanted to develop a word processor.

Imagine what the world would be just as if they had stuck to that promise. How would your life without C or Unix? When was the first time in his life has been affected by the work of DMR?

view plainprint?

#include
int main(void)
{
printf(“RIP, dmr.\n”);
return 0;
}