# Dennis Ritchie, Father of C and Co-Developer of Unix, Dies



## J-Sun (Oct 13, 2011)

Article at Wired



-- Here's another good article: Remembering dmr.


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## Vertigo (Oct 14, 2011)

Sad news indeed! 

I have been cutting code in C and C++ since 1981 and learnt C from his perfect book "The C Programming Language" and only the other day I was teaching a commercial C Programming course (don't do so many of those now these days). After the old '70s versions of BASIC (limited to 64k of memory, that's K not M) with no real structure and stuff like Fortran, C was a breath of fresh air. I remember thinking _this is what a programming language should be like_ and then when I moved to C++ and others, like Java, it was really a case of _well they've just finished the job Ritchie started._ Nearly all the programming languages in common use today, from C++ to Java to Pearl, are based on his C. 

He tends to be remembered for his part in the development of UNIX but really his C programming language has had far further reaching consequences than any one operating system. In fact the whole objective of C originally was to make the UNIX operating system portable (and by extension any other operating system). In many ways you could say the C language was the start of open systems. Far more important than anything Bill Gates or Steve Jobs (RIP) ever came up with.

RIP - one of the great computing gurus.


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