Here is my shamelessly plagiaristic attempt to pay tribute to a computing technological visionary who recently passed away after a long battle with cancer. And I am NOT talking Steve Jobs.
Dennis Ritchie, a true pioneer in modern computing, was found dead on Oct 12th in his New Jersey home at the age of 70. The exact date of death cannot be identified since Mr. Ritchie chose to live alone despite being in declining health in recent years due to prostate cancer. For most of the general public, his name is as alien as Martian. However, anyone self-respecting software developer will tell you that Mr. Ritchie’s contribution to the industry is as monolithic as Steve Jobs’, if not more.
As the chief designer of the C programming language in the late 60s, Dennis Ritchie brought to the world a more sophisticated tool to program a computer for hitherto computer software had been written primarily in assembly language or even machine code, a very low level and cryptic instruction set that are both labour-intensive to write and difficult to decipher. The C programming language, on the other hand, provides a (relatively) closer to human-language syntax and allows programmer to shift the focus from execution level to a more paradigm aspect of a design. The quantum leap of computing advancement the C language brought is comparable to the evolvement of written language from spoken dialog in the linguistic term, and it also paved the way for the more complicated programming languages that we use today.
Together with Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie also co-invented UNIX, the first computer operating system that won widespread acceptance. Today we are so used to having a platform like Windows or MacOS to run our software applications that we might not realize what a monumental concept an operating system was. Flashback forty years ago when dinosaur like mainframe was lauded as the most cutting-edge programmable machine, software programs were installed and run via punch cards since the machine was virtually devoid of an interface between end user and its system resource. Such cumbersome maneuver restricted the device to mainly engineers. The introduction of this intermediate layer between the machine and the user’s program made computer much more user-friendly. And because the UNIX Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson built was essentially free, it was easily obtainable and enhanced, indirectly led to the democratizing of computer from primarily corporate and government use to indispensible household appliance.
In all honesty, I can only be considered as a pseudo(哎呀)-techie at best. I reached the legal age for marriage before I first used a computer and my embarrassing discovery that there exists more than one language you can use to program a computer is material made for stand-up comedy. Naturally my experience with C was and is not smooth sailing (remember those dreadful pointer de-referencing?) and every software developer has horror stories to spare about UNIX’s segmentation fault and core dump. While these tools might seem primitive by today’s standard, you have to realize that they played a crucial role in the evolving of what we have taken for granted in computer technologies today. When you put them in this perspective you can’t help but marvel the ingenuity of their creators and what a vision they have.
While being greatly mourned within the industry, Dennis Ritchie’s passing was barely mentioned in the mainstream media and the public remains oblivious to his contribution to their lives. Given that UNIX is the very operating system Mac OS X inherited from and eventually went into various handheld gadgets Apple Inc. sold, the irony is not lost in the tech community when Steve Jobs' passing has been greeted with outpours of tributes but Dennis Ritchie’s is by and large ignored.
I am not born yesterday to not realize that in our society it is the kind of marketing geniuses like Steve Jobs who are celebrated over the nameless inventors like Dennis Ritchie, and I have no intention to discredit Steve Jobs’ achievement either, the world needs both kinds of people. However, as someone who makes a living (or should I say ‘steals’ a living) on the legacy Dennis Ritchie has left behind, I feel obligated to let the uninformed be aware that the lofty pedestal Steve Jobs has been put on, rests in no small part on the shoulder of Mr. Ritchie’s twin towers of invention
