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Saturday, May 18, 2013

Dennis Richie- A Personal Hero

A conversation last night with a friend made me think about one of my personal heroes... Mr. Dennis Ritchie. Along with his coworker Ken Thompson, Ritchie is the father of the C programming language... which makes him father of every modern programming language. If that was not enough, he is also father of the UNIX Operating system and grandfather of Linux. To the uninitiated, that means that all Apple OS X machines, all androids, 90% of internet servers run on Ritchie's operating system. Mr Ritchie died one week after Steve Jobs. Ritchie may have been forgotten by the public but he will always be a hero to me...

Dennis Ritchie the computer scientist that created many of the tools of the modern era of computers was born on September 9, 1941 and was found dead in his home where he lived alone on October 12, 2011. While the world gushed over the loss of Steve Jobs, Ritchie's death garnered little attention. To some deeply involved in the computer community, this seemed terribly unfair. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/without-dennis-ritchie-there-would-be-no-jobs/19020
Jobs got rich selling computers running the operating system that Ritchie had created, and Gate's fortune is built on the Windows OS believed to be largely written in C, the language that Ritchie wrote.


In case someone didn't get the significance of the "goodbye world" by Ritchie's picture, it is twist on the traditional first program that is always taught in any programming language. In researching this, I decided to find out where the traditional "Hello World" program came from among programmers, and Richie's iconic book may have been one of the first places it was used. Some references claim a version of the first "Hello, World!" program appeared  as part of the documentation for the BCPL programming language. If this is true, Brian Kernighan wrote the first "Hello, World!" program prior to the 1978 printing of the "C Programming Language" by Ritchie and Kernighan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_world_program Either way, the "Hello World!" best known and loved is the traditional hello world program in ANCI C, Ritchie's language:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
    printf("Hello, world!\n");
    return 0;
}

Some quibble about whether a "Hello, World!" traditionally  is written with the first letters capitalized or not, or whether there should be exclamation marks behind it. Never mind all that, Hello World is the first programming accomplishment of thousands, perhaps millions of coders including me. In changing it to "goodbye world", we mournfully commemorate one of the greatest hackers of all times.

It is nearly impossible to imagine a world without C and UNIX. These two innovations along with there numerous derivatives like C++, Objective C, C# and the Linux, BSD, and Android families of operating systems are so pervasive. It could be said that almost all modern programming languages  were derived from C in some sense. 


Bell Labs, Ritchie's employer, still has his homepage posted; I found it to be fascinating and it has many links that any geek will love. 
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/ Among the links is PDF of the 1972 UNIX manual and many other delightful things. http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/1stEdman.html Also, Dennis Ritchie's classic book on C is still available through many online sources. http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/3952.

Ritchie's legacy will not vanish quickly, and we can be thankful to have the achievements of Dennis Ritchie to stand on. A wise man said that "If I have seen farther it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." More than once it has been said that every one of us stands on the shoulders of Ritchie.

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