It’s been a bad week for computing pioneers. Steve Jobs on October 5th, and, more quietly, Dennis Richie died October 9th. We’re hearing all about Steve Jobs in the news, because he was a salesman and a showboat. We’re not hearing about Dennis Richie because he did his very best to avoid attention while he did interesting things.
He developed the C programming language, in which virtually all low level programming has been done for the last twenty some years, and from which most widely used modern languages inherit their syntactic structure. He was a major player in the development of UNIX, an operating system which has become so universal that both the vast majority of smartphones and the vast majority of supercomputers run one of it’s derivatives or descendants.
His contributions are so fundamental that they shape the nomenclature and notation we use to discuss computing, and in essence created the world I live in.
I have a copy of K&R in the home directory of all my computers, and always hoped to meet him. His wisdom and knowledge will be sorely missed, but he long ago discovered the secret to immortality: he didn’t just make things, he made things that make things, and as such he will live on through the tools he designed – tools so elegant that we’ll all, mostly unknowingly, be using them every day on every computer for as long as computers remain recognizable.
exit 0;
