Couldn't agree more...
Originally shared by Brad Templeton
When I saw the news about Steve Jobs it was a shock. But the news that Dennis Ritchie has died was much more like a blow. I didn't know him super well, we attended Usenix together for many years, but he was mostly a quiet man, not the sort to seek the limelight.
Dennis was instrumental in two things -- the C language and Unix -- which are the foundation of almost all the computing in the world today. Certainly much of C came from its predecessors like B and BCPL, and many things in Unix from its predecessors like Multics, but these two focal points were where all of 60s and early 70s computer science came together, and spread out. Of course Linux and MacOS and Android are very direct descendants of Unix, but even Windows is filled with ideas from Unix.
Far more than Steve Jobs, pretty much all your computing is based on Dennis' work. Last week Google noted Jobs at the bottom of the home page, a very rare honour. But Dennis Ritchie would be even more deserving of it.