Dennis Ritchie, Co-inventor of C and Unix, Dies at 70.

Hmmm -- there's a bad moon rising in the operating system sphere. Last week, Steve Jobs passed away of cancer, and made the cover simultaneously of the three primary news weeklies. Dennis Ritchie will probably not achieve that fate, which is in many ways a shame. Jobs was a showman, a marketing genius without parallel, but he was never really a geek. Ritchie was. In the late 1960s, he set about with Ken Thompson to create a new operating shell for minicomputers at Bell Labs, eventually resulting in an assembly language-based core system called UNIX. In the process, he and Thompson authored the C language as a way of abstracting the cumbersome and time consuming process of working with assembly into a more manageable form. One of the first major projects with this new language was the refactoring of Unix so that it was written in C, and the language and operating system remained inseparable since.

C is arguably one of the three major languages in the computer world. It's lineage includes C++ (which introduced object oriented programming to the mix), Java (which significantly reduced the need for pointer manipulation and garbage collection), JavaScript (which is the most pervasive language on the web) and numerous other spin-offs from these. Unix similarly has become the underlying operating system on the web, on servers, and on mobile devices, not to mention countless embedded implementations. Linux is unarguably a flavor of Unix with many of the core functions rewritten under the GPL, and just about every current operating system in use other than Windows (which borrowed a Unix variant called CPM) is powered by the creation of Dennis Ritchie.

The world may mourn Steve Jobs' passing, but I think I will light a small candle to the memory of a true engineer and programmer. Good night, dmr, and thank you.