RIP Dennis Ritchie

A few days after Jobs, Dennis Ritchie also died (here with Ken Thompson; Ritchie is on the right).

Probably few people know who he was, in fact, not many people have talked about him. Yet Ritchie had a far greater impact on the world of computing than Jobs did because, in the late 1960s, he developed the Unix operating system that today underpins Linux, Mac OS-X, iOS (the operating system for iPhone and iPad), Android, and many other derivatives.

The key to Unix's success lies in its level of abstraction. Before Unix, programmers had to behave differently with each computer and each device (hard disk, printer, monitor, keyboard, various cards). In practice, printing with an IBM printer required different commands than with an HP printer, and even changing graphics cards meant modifying the programs. In Unix, however, all devices are seen in the same way—as files. Consequently, the programmer can treat them all in the same way. It is then up to the device drivers to interpret the program's low-level commands so that that particular device functions correctly.

The fact that even newborn machines are running an operating system created 50 years ago is a testament to the validity and elegance of Unix, which has survived the decades without aging.

Later, together with Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson, he marked another milestone in computing by creating the C programming language, one of the most widely used languages in the world, with which thousands of applications of all types and parts of various operating systems have been developed (among others, Windows and Mac systems are also largely written in C).

Kernighan and Ritchie also wrote the historic manual "The C Programming Language," which educated generations of programmers (including myself), so much so that it is universally known simply as the K&R.

Together with his colleague Ken Thompson, he received the Turing Award in 1983, the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal in 1990, the National Medal of Technology in 1999, and the Japan Prize for Information and Communications this year.

Yet no one went on TV to say that Ritchie was a genius, and he himself would have rejected that label. Of a reserved and shy nature, he shunned public audiences, preferring to remain within his circle of hackers (in the original sense of the term). But if Ritchie were the inventor of the internal combustion engine and someone else had built the automobile around it, Jobs would at most be the inventor of metallic paint.

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