certainly unfortunate that someone as important to computing as Dennis Ritchie has not received the honors and the media coverage was the death of Steve Jobs just days before, but I’m afraid that was inevitable given that the public image Jobs was well known while Ritchie was a genius who had just not that popular because they never sought media .

Dennis Ritchie (standing) and Ken Thompson, creators of the Unix operating system

However

industry knows very well what it meant to Ritchie for computer history. Torvalds said repeatedly that all his work “ rested on the shoulders of giants “, and certainly one of those giants was Dennis Ritchie, the father of C and the creator with Ken Thompson’s Unix operating system.

One of the best tributes to the mainstream media we have seen in the New York Times, which made a fantastic overview of the life of Dennis Ritchie, but it is interesting that some large companies have Open Source also words of respect for a true legend of computing .

the case of Red Hat, which recently published on its website an elegant tribute to Ritchie :

With sad hearts of Red Hat community mourns the death of computer pioneer Dennis Ricthie MacAlister. Dennis Richie was the principal designer of the programming language C and co-developer of the Unix operating system, in close collaboration with Ken Thompson, his former colleague at Bell Labs

Many of us are proud of our role in the Unix operating system long before the emergence of Linux. For the Unix world, Ritchie and Thompson were as influential as it is today Linus Torvalds to the Linux community. The direct descendants and “spiritual” Unix and C are countless, but include Linux, Android, Mac OS X, IOS, JavaScript, C + +, the genius of the Internet and a whole world of developers. The main impact of Unix is ​​not alone in the elegance of your code but in the culture of sharing work across industry and academia, which became the hallmark of Unix. [...]

Many of us grew up literally in the shadow technique of Dennis and we still have his book, “The C Programming Language”, written with Brian Kernighan and later the world would refer to as K & R. It remains a source of inspiration and practical help for developers today.

Most of what we do is heavily influenced by the incredible contributions of Dennis, both on technical and in his role as founder of the concept of community development. In Red Hat contemplate his legacy with awe and reverence. “

great tribute all yield to a myth of modern computing. Well done, Red Hat.