Dennis Ritchie passed away

(http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/rip-dmr.html)

Dennis Ritchie (known by software guys as dmr, his username), the father of C, and creator with Kenneth Thompson, Brian Kernighan, and a few others of UNIX, passed away.

They said it couldn’t be done, and he did it (Bjarne Stroustrup, father of C++, about Dennis Ritchie)

Some things we now know to be good ideas. One of them is writing operating systems in a compiled machine-independent programming language. It’s hard to believe that there was a time when this wasn’t conventional wisdom, but there was such a time. Unix combines more obvious-in-retrospect engineering design choices than anything else I’ve seen or am likely to see in my lifetime. It is impossible — absolutely impossible — to overstate the debt my profession owes to Dennis Ritchie. I’ve been living in a world he helped invent for over thirty years (Tim Bray)

And here is Dennis Ritchie in his own words:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/

(Blogosphere)