The news around the Internet today is that Dennis Ritchie, inventor of the C programming language and the UNIX operating system, passed away over the weekend. I think it’s a mark of his impact that it might not be readily apparent exactly how important Ritchie was to our modern technology world. The fact of the matter is the majority of today’s Internet runs on some form of Unix. If I might steal a phrase from Steve Jobs, Unix largely ‘just works’. We don’t realize how much it’s humming along every single day. Arc was originally released on Unix, and I think it still impacts its current development. ERDAS’s Imagine feels like it still wants to be primarily a Unix program. Heck, even fundamental OS systems like Mac OS X and Android wouldn’t exist withouth Ritchie’s work.
On top of that, he invented arguably the most important programming language of all time. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts parts the upcoming Arc 10.1 was written in the language he invented. If programming languages were tracked like human languages, C would be the Latin of the programming world. C and it’s off shoots (C++, Objective-C, C#, and even Java) drive pretty much every technology device in the last 20 years or longer.
We lost Steve Jobs last week and his visionary designs will be sorely missed. Almost equally missed will be Ritchie’s visionary infrastructure designs. RIPC Dennis Ritchie…. RIPC.