Dennis Ritchie, Creator of C Programming Language, Passed Away

WankerWeasel writes "The sad news of the death of another tech great has come. Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language and a key developer of the Unix operating system, has passed away. For those of us running Mac OS X, iOS, Android and many other non-Windows OS, we have him to thank. Many of those running Windows do too, as many of the applications you're using were written in C."

Re:Goodbye

[smash]

As stated above. Without C, we wouldn't have Unix (which he also co-developed), Windows, OS X (and thus the i-devices) or most of the other modern operating systems. His contributions will live on.

Re:Goodbye

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, dmr did have a huge impact on the current state of affairs within the computing industry, and far beyond. But let's not pretend that things wouldn't have developed otherwise. The direction and outcome may have been very different, of course, but progress would have continued.

If C hadn't arisen, we'd likely be using a language derived from PL/I or Pascal, both of which were C's main competitors in the 1970s. Hell, in an alternate world, maybe even Smalltalk would have taken off, had C not been so popular. Computing today would be very different than it is now had that happened. Given the very nature of Smalltalk, it may in fact have been far more open, without the need for the FSF and similar organizations and efforts.

If UNIX hadn't arisen, we may very well be using a system that was based off of TOPS-20 or VMS instead. Those were essentially killed off by UNIX for most lower-end uses throughout the 1970s and 1980s. That wouldn't necessarily have been a bad thing. VMS offered some unique concepts and abilities that UNIX-like systems have only gained recently. It also offered far more flexibility when it came to userland programming languages, with interoperability between languages as diverse as ALGOL, BASIC, FORTRAN, PL/I, and COBOL being almost seamless.

Dmr made some remarkable contributions, no doubt, but there were many, many factors at play that resulted in his creations and discoveries becoming what they are today.

SFW link, please

[bjb]

Sorry to rant about this, but for the folks who live behind a websense firewall, a social networking site like Google+ is as good as no link at all.

Spent 5 seconds to find one that isn't blocked by proxy servers:

Father of C and UNIX Dennis Ritchie passes away at age 70 [techcrunch.com]

Re:Not just the apps

[TheRaven64]

C is actually a subset of c++ as in all c programs will compile with a c++ compiler but C++ will not compile in a c compiler.

No it isn't. Some examples:

int class;

Valid C, not valid C++. How about a more complicated one?

int f();
int g()
{
f(1, 2, "three");
}

Valid C, not valid C++. Or another simple one:

int a;
void *foo = &a;
int *b = foo;

Once again, valid C, not valid C++. The semantics of inline are very different in C and C++. And here's a really fun one:

#include <stdio.h>

int foo;

int main(void)
{
struct foo { int a, b, c; };
printf("%d\n", (int)sizeof(foo));
return 0;
}

If sizeof(int) is 4 and alignof(int) is 4, this prints 4 in C and 12 in C++.

Why am I such a geek?

I didn't know that the definition of 'geek' had been changed to 'someone who believes falsehoods'.

Re:He was an atheist

[Chrisq]

You know, the majority of all people ever born has not yet died. Therefore the evidence that everyone eventually dies is not very good. :-)

Rubbish [guardian.co.uk]

Re:Goodbye

[TheRaven64]

The FSF came into being because RMS had a printer with a buggy driver and couldn't fix it. With Smalltalk, the image contains all of the code. In a traditional Smalltalk environment, it's basically impossible to distribute code that the end user can't fix. If RMS' printer driver had been in Smalltalk, he'd have just fixed it and moved on, not founded the FSF.

Re:Not just the apps

[TheRaven64]

But when it was created, it was another world, and low level languages were needed because there was a lot less computing power available, and you didn't want to waste any.

To put this in perspective:

The Xerox Alto ran Smalltalk. It ran a VM, which was written in a static subset of Smalltalk that was natively compiled, and the rest of the code was interpreted bytecode from a dynamic, object-oriented language, including a GUI, an introspective development environment, and some apps. It required a microcoded BitBlt instruction to be able to achieve a usable speed. This was on a processor that didn't even reach 1MHz, with half a meg of RAM.

Objective-C was created in 1986 because the processor and memory requirements of Smalltalk were deemed unreasonably high.

Re:And no patents

[LizardKing]

C was not written by a team of computer scientists, it was written by two telecoms software engineers. It was based on Thompson's earlier language B, which was inspired by BCPL. Having read the book on BCPL, I can assure you that C resembles it as much as Java resembles Smalltalk. As for C#, it's a clone of Java. Java was inspired by Goslng's experience with Objective C and NeXT's framework, which were in turn inspired by Smalltalk (Gosling encountered Objective C when Sun Microsystems were toying with idea of adopting OpenStep as their desktop). As for academics, the ones I've worked with use Perl, C, Java, Fortran and in one instance Pascal. I've never in almost twenty years of professional coding encountered even one person using Haskell, Erlang or a Lisp dialect. The nearest I've seen is one abortive attempt by a colleague to use DSSSL (based on Scheme) for a project in the late 1990's.

Re:dmr

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes time, but it is percolating up to broader/general media [bbc.co.uk].

Re:Goodbye

[smash]

I was taking issue with the original posters assertion that without him, nothing we have computing wise in the modern world would exist. Which is patently ABSOLUTE BOLLOCKS.

No, you read things into my post that were never written or intended to be implied.

Stuff that matters

[Torodung]

Now this matters. Goodbye and well done.