Sometimes something is so obvious that you can forget how important it is. Without air or water we would die. Without love and human contact, our souls would shrivel down to nothing.
And without Dennis Ritchie, so much that we take for granted today would not exist. The idea that a computer program can be a thing of beauty and elegance, the seamless mixture of artistry and technology that we take for granted in everything from Google to the iPad to Kinect, the very language with which our modern world was built.
It’s astonishing to realize how much we owe to the mind of one quietly brilliant man.
Dennis Ritchie passed away on October 12, 2011. He will be missed.
Amen.