RIP, Dennis Ritchie

This is a bad bad month for technology. First it was Steve Jobs, now it is reported that Dennis Ritchie (dmr) is no more. Rob Pike has posted that Dennis Ritchie passed away in his Google+ stream. In his post he says :

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.

For those who don’t know, Dennis Ritchie is one of the inventors of the C language and UNIX. Much of computing today stand on the foundations built by this great man. Without C, we wouldn’t have high level languages. Without UNIX, Operating Systems (including Linux, Mac OS and BSD) wouldn’t have reached the state it has today. We owe a lot to him and it’s with sadness that we receive this news.

RIP, dmr.

Update : If you’re looking for Dennis Ritchie’s homepage, then it maybe down right now. See Google’s cached version of the page. TechCrunch has also reported the news.

No related posts.