We all owe big to Dennis Ritchie

Oct 142011

I just came back from IIT Guwahati and discovered that Dennis Ritchie has passed away

Most people would know of Dennis Ritchie as the person who invented C and Unix. What most folks do not realize is how profound C and Unix were when they were created and what amazing impact they have had on the industry.

Consider this – before C, you had to program directly to the instruction set of the machine you were programming on. Today when most hardware happens to be x86 or ARM, this seems simple, but back then, the variety of hardware was far more. And this hardware was different not just in terms of instruction sets, but also in terms of information representation, memory addressing, etc. Sure enough there were languages like Fortran and COBOL which could do math and data, but there was no general purpose language which could produce programs that could compete in terms of performance with custom code written for the hardware. Writing a portable program, much less a portable operating system was un-imaginable.

And yet, Dennis Ritchie imagined just such a world and invented a highly performant, high level programming language and then used that to write an operating system which could be ported to any hardware. This one change meant that programmers did not have to create a new OS for every new piece of hardware that got thrown at them – they could take for granted a set of tools, calls and programs, as being available and could spend time going up the value chain and doing more interesting things than just re-inventing the wheel. The result was a spurt of innovation and growth which allowed the industry to grow exponentially into a myriad different directions leading to the world we are in.

If you are a programmer, you owe a lot to Ritchie, whether you have ever programmed in C or worked on Unix or not.

[Edit: Bjarne Stroustrup expresses the same sentiment way more eloquently: http://herbsutter.com/2011/10/12/dennis-ritchie/

Most of us are happy to settle for incremental change. People like Ritchie don’t, and that’s what sets them apart.]

  • Tushar Chowdhury

    Great work Vineet. Indeed for those who love to write code, specially like me, those who are declared fan of UNIX and C/C++ based System Programming…….Dennis Ritchie is truly a GOD for them, definitely the other few fellows are – Richard Stallman, Bjarne Stroustrup, Dave Abrahams so on and so forth. But I firmly believe that without the contribution of Dr. Dennis Ritchie, along with Ken Thompson, by creating the Magic Platform UNIX the programming community could never serve the world of human the ways today.

    I still could recall my 9th/10th standard when I first took up the book, “The C Programming Language”. Instead of picking up so called helper book, my dad (who was also a programmer and worked for Xerox Corp for long) insisted me to choose that book to learn C programming because as per him, the guy who invented something is the best man to wrote about it. And voila, indeed still today I never found a book to learn C programming better than this one. Even after working for 8 years in Programming world, I still used to solve the exercises from that book, it really gives me a real peace of mind.

    Dr. Ritchie, I Tushar Chowdhury, proudly confess that I am one of those billions who became a Computer Programmer because of you, I am one of those millions who got a job and serving his family because of you.

    I sincerely pray to god, so that his soul can rest in peace.