Dennis Ritchie (Creator of “C”, Man Who Worked on Unix) Passes Away
It has been reported that Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the “C” programming language and one of the men largely responsible for Unix, has passed away. While Dennis Ritchie probably doesn’t have the name power of Steve Jobs, his contributions to the computing world are just as important.
For starters, C, and its object-oriented offspring language C++, are widely used in application and even operating system development. C made it possible to do things a lot of people didn’t imagine could be done in the world of computing.
And Unix? Well, it’s only the basis for everything Linux, including Android. It’s also the basis for Mac OS X, the operating system created by Apple. We don’t know if we’d ever have Android without these foundations, but we do have the foundation and it deserves a ton of recognition.
Likewise, Dennis Ritchie deserves a great deal of that recognition for his hand in all of it, as well. He died at the age of 70, though exact date and cause are not being publicized. We kind of hate that his passing is almost non-existent to people up against Steve Jobs’, but we digress. We’ll all know that he was just as important, anyway. [3News]