RIP Dennis Ritchie

It’s a common oldster refrain that when you reach a certain age, you have to get used to people you know dying. I think that we, as a community, will have to accept the fact that over the next decade we’re going to wave goodbye to many of those who were the architects of 70s computer technology. He died the same month as his contemporary Steve Jobs, but in many ways, he lived on the opposite side of the tech spectrum: Jobs was a great businessman, but Ritchie was a technology man. His contributions to the C programming language and the UNIX operating system are probably the achievements that have had the biggest impact on the world of Linux. The C programming language was developed by Ritchie in the late 60s.