Back in the early 1980s I learnt programming in C by reading “Kernighan and Ritchie”, as everyone around me called this book then: “The C programming language” by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie.

It is no exaggeration to say that C and its derivatives are to computers what hydrogen is to the universe.

Dennis Ritchie, who passed away today at the age of 70, was a co-creator of both the C programming language and of the Unix operating system, after which open source Linux is modelled today. Mac OS X and iOS are direct descendants of Unix (NetBSD), while Android, which runs on millions of smart phones, is based on Linux. Virtually every operating system that matters these days (including all versions of Microsoft Windows) is written in C or C++ or another C-derived language.

Dennis Ritchie may not have become as much of a household name as Steve Jobs, but the software he created probably brought about much more fundamental changes than anything Steve Jobs did, and in fact most of what Jobs created would have been unthinkable without either C or Unix.

See also:

• Dennis Ritchie, Trailblazer in Digital Era, Dies at 70 (New York Times, 2011-10-13)