Dennis Ritchie received the 2011 Japan Prize in May.
Posted on 10/14/2011 1:59:19 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Dennis M. Ritchie, who helped shape the modern digital era by creating software tools that power things as diverse as search engines like Google and smartphones, was found dead on Wednesday at his home in Berkeley Heights, N.J. He was 70.
Mr. Ritchie, who lived alone, was in frail health in recent years after treatment for prostate cancer and heart disease, said his brother Bill.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, working at Bell Labs, Mr. Ritchie made a pair of lasting contributions to computer science. He was the principal designer of the C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system, working closely with Ken Thompson, his longtime Bell Labs collaborator.
The C programming language, a shorthand of words, numbers and punctuation, is still widely used today, and successors like C++ and Java build on the ideas, rules and grammar that Mr. Ritchie designed. The Unix operating system has similarly had a rich and enduring impact. Its free, open-source variant, Linux, powers many of the world’s data centers, like those at Google and Amazon, and its technology serves as the foundation of operating systems, like Apple’s iOS, in consumer computing devices.
“The tools that Dennis built — and their direct descendants — run pretty much everything today,” said Brian Kernighan, a computer scientist at Princeton University who worked with Mr. Ritchie at Bell Labs.
Those tools were more than inventive bundles of computer code. The C language and Unix reflected a point of view, a different philosophy of computing than what had come before. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, minicomputers were moving into companies and universities — smaller and at a fraction of the price of hulking mainframes.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
But to us technology people, especially those who developed in the C programming language under UNIX (which evolved into C++ and Object Oriented Programming), He was a pioneer as significant as Steve Jobs.
RIP Dennis and thank you for many years of helping to put bread on my table.
Hey, I still have that same exact manual on my desk too.
It’s old, but I could never bring myself to disposing of it.
C:\DOS
C:\DOS\RUN
RUN\DOS\RUN
I have one of the original versions and the second edition and “Unix Programmers Manual.”
The best part about his books and the language in general was how easy it was to learn and use! All of my programming was self-taught through his books and a few other books which came later!
Look at my tag on FR.
It is a DIRECT result of this man, that I first found gainful employment after graduating from the beloved University of Texas
I figure, without C and C++ and C# and Java (all languages that I have/am worked/working in, I would not have a job
God Bless you my good Sir! Vaya con Dios!
Only kidding.
LOL.
> I wish he’d used the ~ instead of the * for the dereference > operator, but other than that it’s pretty good.
>
> Only kidding.
Hope so!
~ is the bitwise NOT unary operator.
Whoa! Thanks for the great hint!
All these years, I've been subtracting from -1!
Maybe that book was better than the Waite Group book on C.
That book is on my very short list of horrid books in general as well as “texts”.
My teacher didn’t help that much; I couldn’t get my mind around it all. As a result, I hate C, and probably still would even with a good book.
Anyway, off the soapbox, and RIP Mr. Ritchie.
Make that #include stdio (with angle brackets). :)
Unix operating system is violent, to wit: Good parents always kill off their children before they die to stop them from becoming zombies.
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