On October 12th, 2011 Dennis Ritchie died. Most of you are too young to remember who he was. To old geezers like me he was a programming geek many of us wanted to be. He invented the C programming language. It has been far too long since i have written a line of C. It is such a wonderfully elegant and powerful language.
Back in the day to be able to say you programmed in C gave you a certain stature among fellow programmers. The raw power and sheer beauty of pointers. The brilliance of the header files in abstracting the machine but still allowing us an intimate experience to use all its power. Being able to wisely know when to use register to create lighting fast stacks. Macros and other preprocessor directives. i could go on and on.
Most modern day block languages can be traced back to C.
Most of us involved in programming plumbing, or working to build higher order code have moved on to using higher level languages. While most still involved in plumbing and infrastructure use C++, it really is C that led the way to where we are today.
SQL, TCP/IP, The modern GUI. They all have roots that can be traced back to C. C freed us from the tedium of assembler. It allowed us to start thinking less about the machine and more about the virtual space that is software that we wanted to dream in.
Dennis Ritchie was a true icon in the programming community and will be missed. His passing is the passing of an era that in digital years seems to these gray temples like ancient history.
