I just heard that, after a long illness, Dennis Ritchie (dmr) died at home this weekend. I have no more information.
I trust there are people here who will appreciate the reach of his contributions and mourn his passing appropriately.
He was a quiet and mostly private man, but he was also my friend, colleague, and collaborator, and the world has lost a truly great mind.
As a programmer, I want to pay a simple tribute to the creator of a great programming language (the C programming language), Dennis Ritchie a.k.a. DMR.
The quote above came from a post published by Rob Pike on his Google+ account. He is a friend of DMR and they worked together with UNIX and Google. And his death was confirmed via email from Jeong Kim (President of Bell Labs for employees).
The C programming language is known to most as the God’s programming language. Why? You must try to code using it. C programming language became a father of most high-level language and operating systems of today. C started it all.
As what I have posted on my tumblr blog, without C, the most popular language (java) won’t exist; without C, UNIX will never be as powerful as it is right now; without C, we shall not have the platforms we are enjoying right now. But despite of that creation, his name was not as famous as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds, James Gosling, etc. But I believe, that these guys are very thankful of DMR for he made their creations possible and innovative.
The world of programmers saddened of that news. Just like what Rob Pike said, the world has lost a truly great mind. I hope, DMR saw how beautiful the world that his programming language has built.
Before I end this tribute, I want to share this quote from Dennis Ritchie which is very true and applicable specially for the newbies. I hope, this will make a good sense for all of us.
The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
Sir DMR, thanks for UNIX; thanks for creating C.
I agree that C can be considered as the God’s programming language, it’s one of the basic language that every programmer should learn, or at least touch even once in their lives.
Btw, seeing the picture of the code… uhmmm.. something’s wrong with the while loop. It won’t even go inside the block and would directly go to return statement without printing anything. :p
@aj: Yes, that code wouldn’t return anything. Why? I was supposed to create an infinite loop if I changed the while condition. That’s the worse thing I experienced in C when I was still in college.
I didn’t explain what that code means for I want that image to touch only programmers. You have a great eye for that. You don’t even need a compiler huh.
Don’t worry, that code is safe to use.
what I actually thought is you are trying to create an infinite loop (as the “never-ending” word suggests), but then as I read it, I found out that the code won’t return anything at all and won’t even do anything.. hehe
Agree, the code is safe to use. 🙂
Yes, if I did that, PC should possibly hangup. Old PC might damaged. And he created C for development purposes and not to destruct. Though we all know that C can do that.
It’s better be safe.
And you know what? I think I am missing the gotoxy code. that’s my favorite in C.