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On Tue, 2011-10-18 at 10:58 +0200, Miguel Ortiz LombardÃa wrote: > Hi community, > > I have been waiting for someone more knowledgeable to write about the > passing away of Dennis Ritchie (8 October) especially after the recent > obituaries posted in the list. I confess I know little about him, except: > > 1/ He created the C language ( and together with Brian Kernighan wrote > an extremely useful book about it ) > 2/ He and Ken Thompson were key in the development of something called > UNIX... > > Undoubtedly, he made an impact in our field. > > In my humble opinion, the most important contribution was the implementation of the portability concept by rewriting the UNIX OS in C. The main impact of this step (which seems so trivial to us today) was the creation of the programming community that speaks one language. The opposite of what legend has god doing to the tower builders of Babel. The russian translation of Kernighan&Ritchie was my first programming book, and seemingly the only one I ever needed. -- Ed Pozharski <[log in to unmask]> University of Maryland - Baltimore