Dennis Ritchie, creator of the “C” programming language, has passed away. As a friend of mine said, he was one of my youth idols. And I still have his “The C Programming Language” book somewhere…
This is how you can change the world: create something from the third try – experiments named “A”, and “B” were not successful enough – and then simply call it “C”, without ever thinking about real revolution that could cause… I was one of the youth who jumped immediately to “C”, in the late eighties, directly from playing with BASIC and Assembler on my Sinclair Spectrum as a kid. I skipped the Pascal and similar “learning languages”, and I am thankful to destiny for that. I was, and I still am deeply influenced by Dennis Ritchie’s work, since I am still developing on a C programming language derivate.
Rest in Piece, Mr. Ritchie. You were the REAL pioneer in the IT industry. Without your work, a lot of things which we take for granted today would never happen.