RIP - dmr - Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie

[Y_K]

With all the hysteria surrounding Jobs, few noticed the man who truly changed lives of others:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie

He and Ken Thompson wanted to play games, so they invented quite a few breakthrough technologies, like UNIX, Plan 9, UTF-8 and many others. True Hero.

 

[greenaccord02]

And he wrote C. That's a pretty big one.

Very nice guy, apparently. One of the commenting redditors on a dmr post was telling a story about how he was taking C in high school programming class and couldn't figure out a problem, so he wrote Mr. Ritchie an email not expecting any reply. He received a very long and detailed reply that explained everything. The guy was in it for the love, not money or fame. So much so that he would take time to explain a very elementary question to a high school student.

 

[Y_K]

My son had similar exchange with him, very accessible genius. He was a poet of computing.

 

[ToyotaNSaturn]

Originally Posted By: greenaccord02
And he wrote C. That's a pretty big one.

Very nice guy, apparently. One of the commenting redditors on a dmr post was telling a story about how he was taking C in high school programming class and couldn't figure out a problem, so he wrote Mr. Ritchie an email not expecting any reply. He received a very long and detailed reply that explained everything. The guy was in it for the love, not money or fame. So much so that he would take time to explain a very elementary question to a high school student.



That's excellent! I wrote Eric Smith when he was Novell CEO telling him how our company was not happy that Novell was playing hokey-pokey a certain product line. Got a two word response from him. That was the end of that discussion, and the end of that product line.