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From: | Marcus D. Leech |
Subject: | Re: [XForms] Dennis Ritchie is dead |
Date: | Thu, 13 Oct 2011 20:23:33 -0400 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.23) Gecko/20110928 Fedora/3.1.15-1.fc14 Thunderbird/3.1.15 |
On 10/13/2011 06:32 PM, Jens Thoms Toerring wrote:
Yes, if there ever was a giant upon whose shoulders we all stand, Dennis Ritchie was surely one of them.Hi, this is a bit off-topic for this mailing list but since XForms has it's root deeply both in Unix and C please bear with me: Dennis M. Ritchie, together with Ken Thompson one of the "fathers" of Unix, the creator of C and co-author (with Brian Kernighan) of probably one of the best programming books ever, "The C Programming Language", has died. I think not only we as Unix and C programmers owe him a real lot. There are very few people whose work, in a positive sense, that much influenced my life - and rather likely that of thousands and thousands of others - as his. Learning and using C and Unix has been and still is an immense source of fun to me. My thoughts are with his family and friends. Best regards, Jens
I haven't seen Dennis in over 20 years, but on the few occasions that I met him, and had a couple of beers with him, he seemed like a genuinely-nice person, and the most unassuming "giant" one could ever possibly meet. The entire IT/Software/Technology industry owes him a debt of gratitude so insanely large, and yet 99.9% don't even know who
he is.The news of his death has affected me personally today. Not only because I've actually met the man, but because I learned C and Unix "back in the beginning" (1979). My life has been utterly shaped by having lucked into a job in 1979 where I got
to learn C from "The C Tutorial", and program on Unix systems. Goodnight, curly-braces man. You'll be missed. -- Marcus Leech Principal Investigator Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium http://www.sbrac.org
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