RIP Dennis Ritchie

The world has lost one of it's
greatest programmers.

I missed it in the news and just now read about it.  Dennis Ritchie, the father of the C programming language, died on October 12, 2011 at the age of 70.  The work that Dennis has done to bring modern computing to us cannot be overstated.

From Wikipedia:

Ritchie was best known as the creator of the C programming language, a key developer of the UNIX operating system, and co-author of The C Programming Language, commonly referred to as K&R(in reference to the authors Kernighan and Ritchie). Ritchie worked together with Ken Thompson, the scientist credited with writing the original Unix; one of Ritchie's most important contributions to Unix was its porting to different machines and platforms.

The C language is widely used today in application, operating system, and embedded system development, and its influence is seen in most modern programming languages. UNIX has also been influential, establishing concepts and principles that are now precepts of computing.

Ritchie was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988 for "development of the "C" programming language and for co-development of the UNIX operating system."

We will miss you Dennis.