It was only upon reading the December 2011 issue of the IEEE's Spectrum
magazine that I learnt with much sadness of the passing of Dennis M. Ritchie.
Ritchie was found dead in his home October 12, 2011, aged 70, apparently
after ill health following treatment for prostate cancer and heart disease.
Ritchie was one of the most influential computer scientists the world has
seen. The legacy of his pioneering contributions to programming languages
and operating systems helps power much of the digital world today.
He will be most remembered for the creation of the C programming language
and the co-creation of the UNIX operating system whilst at Bell Labs.
All professional programmers will almost certainly have a copy or have
read a copy of the book the "C Programming Language" which he co-wrote with
Brian Kerninghan and which was first published in 1978. For some of
us, this reference book is always kept close at hand whilst we work.
On page 6, that most famous of introductory programs appears in print for the
first time, the now ubiquitous "hello, world" programming example.
The initial development of the C programming language took place between
1969 and 1972. The UNIX operating system was written in C and the language itself
was used to write countless millions of programs on everything from large
supercomputers to the tiniest of microprocessor applications.
For example, consider the World Wide Web. If you visit a random web site,
chances are the content was delivered by an Apache web server of which
there an estimated 378 million installations around the world. The Apache
web server is written primarily in the C programming language.
These days, whenever you turn the ignition of a modern car, push a button
in an elevator or watch a traffic light change at an intersection, chances
are the source code for that embedded application was written in C.
The C programming language then heavily influenced the creation of later
languages, such as C++, Java and C#.
The Unix operating system was originally created at Bell Labs in 1969
by a small team that included Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kerninghan and
Ken Thompson. Originally coded in assembler, by 1973 it had almost entirely
been re-written in C. This is no co-incidence, since Ritchie created C
to help write Unix.
As an article in the December 2011 edition of IEEE Spectrum entitled
"
The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix" describes it, Unix is "
now
considered one of the most inspiring and influential pieces of software
ever written".
My own first personal exposure to Unix was in late 1977.
I still remember that profound feeling of awe when as an undergraduate
studying engineering I first read the 6th Edition Unix source code in 1979.
At the time, it was the largest program I had ever read and it was clear
it was the work of masters. To this day I often wonder whether those who
study music professionally experience that same sense of awe, like an
epiphany, when they study in detail, say, a Beethoven symphony.
One thing is for certain is that Unix helped influence a generation
of computing professionals and it heavily influenced operating systems
such as Linux and OS-X.
Not only that, the coding style in which it was written along with the coding
styles in the examples in the C Programming Language book influenced
countless programmers around the world. This was something that was
to be emulated.
Professionally, Ritchie's contributions to the modern world did not
go unrecognized. In 1983, he was made a Bell Labs Fellow and in that
same year was awarded the prestigious Turing Award. In 1990, he received
the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal.
In 1998, he and Thompson jointly received the National Medal of Technology
from President Bill Clinton for the creation of UNIX and C, which the
citation read "
led to enormous advances in computer hardware, software,
and networking systems and stimulated growth of an entire industry,
thereby enhancing American leadership in the Information Age".
Around 1979, Ritchie came to Australia and I attended a talk he gave to
staff and students at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science at UNSW. I asked him what he thought of all the attention and
celebrity he was receiving and he dismissed it with something simple as
that he viewed himself as just a programmer.
In some ways, his response was like the code in Unix itself -
elegant, low on words and to the point.
With Ritchie's death taking place only a week after that of
Steve Jobs, it is unfortunate that his passing was largely ignored
by the popular press.
Yet the legacy of Dennis Ritchie lives on in the modern technological world
and every time you power on a smart phone, surf the web, fly in a
modern passenger plane or power on a set top box, chances are
that something he helped invent is involved. Even our own Argo Navis
Digital Telescope Computer has its code almost entirely written in C
which was authored on a Unix derivative platform.
Virtually all large modern professional astronomical observatories are powered
by computers running a Unix derivative and with applications code written in C.
For those who would like to learn more about Dennis Ritchie -
A wikipedia entry for Dennis Ritchie appears here -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie
An obituary for Dennis Ritchie appears in the New York Times here -
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/te...0.html?_r=1&hp
