Dennis Ritchie, a co-creator of Unix and C, passed away a few weeks ago, and was honored with many online tributes this weekend for a Dennis Ritchie Day advocated by Tim O’Reilly.It should hardly be necessary to state the importance of Ritchie’s work. C is the #2 language in use today according to the TIOBE rankings (which, while criticized in some quarters, are at least the best system we currently have for gauging such things). In fact, TIOBE’s preface to the October 2011 rankings predicted that a slow but consistent decline in Java will likely m...

At Cloudmetrx, we use a lot of C. So given the recent passing of UNIX legend Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the C language, we think a toast to C is only fitting.Our extensive reliance on C is especially unusual considering the other languages in our stack – Clojure, Node.js, and other hipster platforms. We aren't predisposed to using older, "venerated" technologies simply because they're older and venerated. But when it comes to high-performant computation, there's just nothing like C. Some will claim Java, but those people are incorrect. There's nothing like C.In my opinion, the reaso...

Dennis Ritchie, a father of modern computing, died on October 8th, aged 70EVERY time you tap an iSomething, you are touching a little piece of Steve Jobs. His singular vision shaped the products Apple has conjured up, especially over the last 14 years, after Jobs returned to the helm of the company he had founded. Jobs's death in October resembled the passing of a major religious figure. But all of his technological miracles, along with a billion others sold by Apple's competitors, would be merely pretty receptacles were it not for Dennis Ritchie. It is to him that they owe their digital souls...

The news of Dennis Ritchie's passing hit hard. So much has been written in the past day. His impact was enormous, and outside the tech world, mostly unknown - but very much felt. C underpins everything. My whole career has grown out of C and Unix. Wow.For most engineers working today, it's hard to understand the euphoria I felt in the 70s when a programming language finally came along that I (and everyone else) could use to move up from writing in assembler to a real programming language. We could do everything we needed to do to write all the low-level bits of systems. Before C...

As we noted earlier this week, one of the founding fathers of UNIX and the creator of C, Dennis Ritchie, passed away last weekend. While I feel that many in computer science and related fields knew of Ritchie’s importance to the growth and development of, well, everything to do with computing, I think it’s valuable to look back at his accomplishments and place him high in the CS pantheon already populated by Lovelace, Turing, and (although this crowing will be controversial, at least until history has its say) the recently-departed Steve Jobs.UNIX was one of the first multi-user ...