RIP Dennis Ritchie
A tribute to Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language and co-author of Unix, who passed away in October 2011, as announced by his friend and colleague Rob Pike.
This weekend, Dennis Ritchie passed away — the creator of the C programming language and co-author of Unix. This was announced by his friend and colleague Rob Pike.
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941 — October 12, 2011) was an American computer scientist. He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system. Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990, and the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007.
His contributions to computing are difficult to overstate. The C programming language remains one of the most widely used languages in the world, more than 40 years after its creation. Unix and its derivatives — Linux, BSD, macOS, iOS, Android — run on everything from supercomputers to smartphones. Nearly every program you interact with daily was either written in C, runs on a Unix-derived OS, or both.
While Steve Jobs's death just days earlier dominated global headlines, Dennis Ritchie's passing received comparatively little mainstream media attention — despite the fact that the very devices people used to mourn Jobs were built on Ritchie's foundational work. The iPhone runs iOS, derived from Unix. Its apps are compiled using descendants of C. The web servers that hosted the tributes to Jobs ran on Linux.
As Rob Pike wrote in his announcement: "I just heard that, after a long illness, Dennis Ritchie has died at home. I have no words."
Rest in peace, Dennis. Your legacy lives on in every computer on the planet.
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