DMR

“C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.” - Dennis Ritchie

C is the mother tongue of every programming language that matters today. If we were linguists, C would be like Proto-Indo-European, the theoretical language that gave rise to Sanskrit, ancient Greek, Germanic, Latin, and from there the Romance languages...

I know a lot of programming languages, and I’ve written thousands of lines of code in everything from assembler to Groovy, but my native language is C, even though I learned Ratfor and Pascal first. Not long ago, at work, I wrote a little C program that turned a 4-hour process into a task of seconds. It’s not that C is fast in itself; the thing is that C taught me to program with discipline, because you have to be very orderly to write well in this language, because you’re very close to the platform. That’s where its power comes from.

C was written by Dennis Ritchie, who together with Ken Thompson built the Unix operating system in the early 1970s. In 1983, Thompson and Ritchie received the Turing Award for their contribution to the development of the Unix operating system.

I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up. -- Dennis Ritchie

As a programming language design enthusiast, a programmer, and a software developer, the news of his death hits me hard and, obviously, brings sadness. One of our founding fathers is gone, one of the greats, who changed and established a way of doing software engineering whose influence is still strong today.