I'm sorry to share the news that Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language and one of the core developers behind Unix, has passed away. As many of you are or recently were college-aged students, you're probably most familiar with his book "The C Programming Language," written with Brian Kernighan. I think we certainly wouldn't have the computing landscape we have today without Richie's work; certainly everything from the structure of most programming languages to widely-accepted OS concepts are thanks in part to his work. A humorous quote from his Wikipedia page to leave you with:

"C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."

RIP, Mr. Ritchie I personally love your programming language

Indeed. I had the pleasure of meeting Kernighan when we got him to come speak at Cooper Union for the ACM/IEEE one year, but I'm afraid I never had the pleasure of meeting Ritchie.

I heard about this last night, very sad :/ My computer science teacher is probably going to spend a while talking to us about this when we get back to school. She always complains about him, though, because she can't wrap her mind around C I personally love the language, and spent about 3 or 4 hours last night playing in it on the Prizm

Errr, she's a computer science teacher and can't wrap her mind around C? I find that rather concerning, no offense to her. What did you make on your Prizm?

Don't worry, it's concerning to me too :/ But it helped because she has lots of books on C that I can borrow. To be fair, she is like 70, and grew up on COBOL, FORTRAN, and BASIC. So far, she is teaching us QBasic, Visual Basic (ugh), and eventually we will get to Java (which she is really bad at, too).

For the Prizm, I was working on a circular Pong game, mostly just getting the paddle to show up (That's why I needed your fixed-point library).

I feel sad, even though I hate his works. It has fostered some of the greatest pieces of software of our time.

Are you kidding? This guy was arguably more important to the computer world than Steve Jobs, and yet his death has barely been mentioned in the news...

You're precious JVM was written in the C he helped create. We all owe Dennis Ritchie for his contributions to modern computing. He Will be sorely missed. I for one plan on reading some more of my copy of K&R tonight.

I for one am very disappointed his name isn't being spammed everywhere like Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs wouldn't exist without Dennis Ritchie.

Oh, wow, we seem to be losing a lot of computer geniuses as of late... it is sad to see him go. To think that, without C, a majority of applications and languages would not exist.

Arguably? It's a pretty tough argument to say that one of the creators of a language used in *every* modern operating system and responsible for more programs than any other is less important than a guy who was really more of a business person than a computer person to computers.

I want to point out something that only Kerm has acknowledged so far, that he invented Unix. Without Unix, much of the early computers that were developed would have existed in their past form. It also provided a basis for the OS that we (mostly) all know and love, Linux, for which I am eternally grateful. Who knows what twisted and convoluted work of software Microsoft would have thought up if it had not been for him- if Microsoft would have been able to exist at all without Unix. As for my earlier comment, I retract it. (I know this looks a bit hypocritical, but even a Java-lover can be grateful to this guy)

Absolutely the truth. Steve Jobs was a masterful businessman and a superb showman, but from what I understand, not a very nice person, including a total lack of philanthropy despite impressive wealth. Compare to the much-mocked Bill Gates, another successful businessman who has at least a decent technical background and has engaged in epic philanthropy. Ritchie was a very quiet, very private person, from what I understand, but huge swaths of our modern computing architecture and infrastructure wouldn't exist in their current form without his work.

Steve Jobs was definitely not a people-person One of my dad's friends worked at Apple a while ago, and she basically gave the most important key to keeping your job: "Don't ever take the same stairway as Jobs. Don't take the same elevator either. If you do happen to get in the same elevator as him, pretend he's not there, and he'll pretend you're not there. If you strike up a conversation, he'll ask you to clear out your desk."

KermM, aye, I do remember now that Bill Gates has spent millions on charity...

Not to continue to be off-topic, but try more like $58 billion.

I was just trying to be fair to Apple fans, but yeah those were my thoughts exactly.

Was anyone else as disappointed as I was that XKCD didn't do a comic about it, like they did with Jobs? I'm still hopeful that they'll do one on Monday.

I'm hopeful too. I saw quite a bit of backlash about that around Twitter and the internets, so it might just be a guilt trip-prompted comic even if there is one, instead of something genuine.