Father Of C And UNIX, Dennis Ritchie, Passes Away At Age 70

After a long illness, Dennis Ritchie, father of Unix and an esteemed computer scientist, died last weekend at the age of 70.

Ritchie, also known as “dmr”, is best know for creating the C programming language as well as being instrumental in the development of UNIX along with Ken Thompson. Ritchie spent most of his career at Bell Labs, which at the time of his joining in 1967, was one of the largest phone providers in the U.S. and had one of the most well-known research labs in operation.

Working alongside Thompson (who had written B) at Bell in the late sixties, the two men set out to develop a more efficient operating system for the up-and-coming minicomputer, resulting in the release of Unix (running on a DEC PDP-1) in 1971.

Though Unix was cheap and compatible with just about any machine, allowing users to install a variety of software systems, the OS was written in machine (or assembly) language, meaning that it had a small vocabulary and suffered in relation to memory.

By 1973, Ritchie and Thompson had rewritten Unix in C, developing its syntax, functionality, and beyond to give the language the ability to program an operating system. The kernel was published in the same year.

Today, C remains the second most popular programming language in the world (or at least the language in which the second most lines of code have been written), and ushered in C++ and Java; while the pair’s work on Unix led to, among other things, Linus Torvalds’ Linux. The work has without a doubt made Ritchie one of the most important, if not under-recognized, engineers of the modern era.

His work, specifically in relation to UNIX, led to him becoming a joint recipient of the Turing Award with Ken Thompson in 1983, as well as a recipient of the National Medal of Technology in 1998 from then-president Bill Clinton.

A sad news indeed! Unix was the first operating system I worked and C was the first language I learnt. On his trip to İstanbul, I was present during his speech at our company, about his current plans and what he was doing then.

Does one have a mother tongue in computer programming, too?

May be.

My first manager was efficient in COBOL and he used to say he found "C" language very hard to learn.

I can make "C" sing and dance but I find some new languages hard to get used to.

It´s a completely unknown field for me but I guess I understand what you mean.

They say that a human being doesn´t use but a small percentage of his brain capacity and I believe this. Actually I feel it every day. Given the time and the effort each one of us could learn so much more.

In my experience there are only two things where brain shows it limits:

1. Learning new languages. Yes, you can learn but not the same way you learned when your mind was still a blank page. Learning a language later in life takes a lot of sorting out and organizing your thoughts and you will never be really fluent. I feel that the only languages I use with a relaxed mind are my mother tongue and English. All the other languages I was ever taught get mixed together in my mind. This is when I try to speak: of course I could analyse sentences on paper because I once worked on it.

2. Daily routines. We stick to our habits, even those which are harmful to us, with a stubbornness which is hard to explain. I think it´s not lack of determination or backbone, it´s brain chemistry.

It´s sad and interesting to see how little notice has been made of his departure. We all owe so much to him. No C, no Java....and so on. RIP Mr. Ritchie. 

Quoting si++

Father Of C And UNIX, Dennis Ritchie, Passes Away At Age 70

 

 

 

A sad news indeed! Unix was the first operating system I worked and C was the first language I learnt. On his trip to İstanbul, I was present during his speech at our company, about his current plans and what he was doing then.