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, programming languages just weren't up to the task: the overheads were just too large. The sophistication of systems was really held back by the difficulty of writing large pieces of software in assembler. C was like JATO for code.
Source : http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/i_ve_run_out_of#comments
