Dennis Ritchie, co-inventor of C and Unix, has passed away.
I first learned C at a summer camp for math enthusiasts. We implemented programs to generate fractals on Sun workstations (or was it SGIs?), and the language we implemented them in was C. I asked around about this interesting language, borrowed a book from someone, and soaked up the language like a sponge. I wish I could remember if the book was K&R, but I do remember reading through one of the first examples in it. The program read its input character by character and performed some transformation on them, perhaps converting them to uppercase, and printed out the result. I remember thinking it was a hard problem, and I remember a growing delight as the chapter broke the problem down into smaller pieces that mapped perfectly to C. I read over and over that ten line program, savoring the while loop and the stdio calls and the looping variable named "c" (or was it "ch"?).
Several years later, I gained access to the Unix machines at Clemson, and it was computing nirvana. The machines had a ubiquitous C compiler, a suite of Internet programs, preemptive multi-tasking, a good scripting language, a good shell, and a windowing operating system to run it all in. Compared to Windows 3.1, DOS (because Windows was a resource hog), batch files, debug.exe, and Pascal, these machines just felt right. It felt like I'd been walking with a fifty pound backpack for miles, and now I could set aside that backpack and walk more lightly.
Unix and C are just that good. At the time, those systems were more than a generation ahead of the IBM, Apple, and Commodore computers everyone was using at home. Nowadays, the number of Unix machines has only grown. Android, Apple, and ChromeOS machines all run Unix. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Ritchie was instrumental in this revolution. Though few seem to have actually talked to the guy, the web is filled with testimonials. Here are a few of them that I have run across:
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