Dennis was a friend.  It is very sad to learn of his passing.  We are all indebted to him for his many contributions to the field.

very sad. I love the writing style of 'The C Programming Language'

Didn't know him personally, but his work has been an inspiration to me for nearly 20 years.  RIP.

Sorry, I'm not a 20 something saying wow 70 is a long time, I'm closer to 50 than 40 so I can almost see 70.  I was trying to provide some perspective on 70 not being old.  It should still be a very productive time in peoples lives, and it's still way too young to die.

Alan Turing would be 99 if he were alive today.

70 years isn't long at all. 100 is the new old:<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centenarian" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centenarian</a>With a bit more research, many people could live to be 90-100.

Folks are gonna look back and think, "Damn, kiba lived through periods of profound change!" as well :)

70 years. That's a long time to be alive! He was born in the middle of WW2, lived through the cold war, seen the collapse of the soviet union, etc.Me? I was born around the time the Linux OS hatched and the internet is starting to open up.

They were huge, and still are. 40 years on, his work is the basis for a lot of what's interesting in tech right now.

Very sad. His contributions to the world were huge. RIP.

black stripe on top of hacker news is really nice touch out of respect

Black bar, definitely deserved. Thanks pg.

One of the most influential people in the world whose contributions were immense. He will be sorely missed.

The conciseness of this book is what I enjoyed the most, just think it could have been 1000 pages, even more...

That book is a reminder of a time when Wrox &#38; friends weren't trying to crank out 5 lb tomes on .NET SOAP Interoperability. So many modern books read like a student trying to pad out a page count for a professor.

In a way I owe my job @ IBM which I got right out of college to that book.Of the many many C books at that time , K&#38;R was obviously the one that was head and shoulders above the rest in terms of explaining C and how to write C programs in a very lucid/concise/Beautiful way and the guys interviewing me were particularly impressed that I almost had memorized K&#38;R and gave me the job which I have to this day

Not only is K&#38;R _the_ book for C, it's an example for engaging, lucid, just-right technical writing that any technical manual should strive for.

DR was someone I looked up to since writing my first C program on a VAX mini-frame. RIP.

This is really sad. Dennis Ritchie has made an incalculably huge contribution to the tech world.I know most here would be aware, but he is a father of both Unix and the C language, technologies which are the basis for nearly everything we as developers do. He helped write K&#38;R, which many regard as _the_ book for C programming.This is the passing of a legend. Sincerest condolences to his family and friends.

To remember[1]:Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was an American computer scientist notable for developing C and for having influence on other programming languages, as well as operating systems such as Multics and Unix.He received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology 1998 on April 21, 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007."C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."- Dennis Ritchie, on The Development of the C Language[2][1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie</a>[2] <a href="http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html" rel="nofollow">http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html</a>

I used to read The C Programming Language every year. As a amateur tech-writer, it has influenced me greatly (that and _why's work).

Oh god. Another legend I truly admire. :(

I started with Turbo C++ 4.0 in 1994 as a geeky 8th grader. You're evoking some powerful memories. A tremendously sad day.

alnayyir, you've been hellbanned. In case you didn't know.

I'm old enough that K&#38;R was the bible when I started with Borland's Turbo C 1.0.  Another sad day for computer science.

I know what you mean, there is all that nostalgia of going through that book so many years ago and learning the programming constructs that would benefit all of us professionally for years to come.

Indeed. I was saddened by the dead of Steve Jobs. And although I comprehend his contribution to humanity, I was never "personally" touched by his products (e.g. I have never owned an Apple product).Dennis Ritchie is a different thing. As other people have pointed, in my opinion there is no current technology that was not "touched" by the contributions that R&#38;K did. Being it Unix or C, these are two of the most important software creations in history.

Actually when I read the post just now, I went to the shelf and picked up my copy of it and just placed it on my desk, he had a major impact on my life.I "feel" more of a loss about Dennis' passing than Steve's.

I wonder how many people here got to know Ritchie through "The C Programming Language", I am sure half of us have it on our shelves.It is amazing how many lives a single person can touch directly and indirectly.I hope Ritchie passed away knowing the unforgettable contribution he made to the world as we all move forward on a platform he set down for us more than 30 years ago.What an awesome legacy to leave behind. Thank you Dennis.

While I dabbled with the language before, The C Programming Language book was a true eye opener for me. Grokking it truly paved the way for my programming career.RIP Dennis Ritchie.

An exemplar of elegance and clear thought. RIP and thank you.

His brother was superintendent while I was in high school. We asked him to invite dmr to come in and give a speech once, but understandingly dmr was too busy and had to decline. If dmr was anything like his brother, he was a great person and will be missed greatly. RIP, you changed the world for the better.

#include &#60;stdio.h&#62;main()
{
 printf("Thank you for creating me\n");
 printf("RIP,Mr.Ritchie\n");
}

good summary, we owe gratitude too him for so many things...

Well, I don't know… I feel that as soon as I mention Pascal or BASIC I am downvoted to oblivion.The original Macintosh was programmed in assembler. As was MS-DOS and Windows up to version 3.1 (perhaps even in important parts in Win95?). The big boom of computing and the GUI had already happened. In the late 80s Turbo Pascal was really popular:
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(programming_language)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(programming_language)</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal</a>For GUI programming there was (and is) the Pascal dialect Delphi:
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarcadero_Delphi" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarcadero_Delphi</a>What would the world look like if C would have been never invented? I guess our browsers would simply be coded in Turbo Pascal dialect.And Visual Basic is still huge (#12 on langpop.com). Also someone could reasonably argue that from the concept and ideas SmallTalk and Lisp were way more influential than C.That said, I feel a bit dirty to make this argument. Dennis Ritchie should be praised for his accomplishments.

Exactly. It's hard to even really comprehend how deep his influence goes; we're so surrounded by it's hard to even see it sometimes.Consider that every single person reading these words are doing so using technology he created -- after all, even if you're not on a UNIX derivative you're probably on an OS and web browser written in C.How much code is written every day in C and its descendants? How much more in languages that themselves are written in C?dmr is part of an very small group of computer scientists that truly changed the paradigm of computing for everyone everywhere (Turing, von Neumann, Engelbart, ...) As long as there are ones and zeros his name will be remembered.

"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -- Dennis Ritchie. RIP.

Absolutely.
Half of the world uses Unix flavours be it linux or any other OS( Mac OSX) , most of the realtime critical apps run on unix.
Most of the primitive codes are written in C , first language most people learn is C(atleast for me).With Unix and C , he has changed the way people think of computers and the way of talking to them.

Sums up my feelings too. dmr is a legendary computer scientist who in all fairness had more impact on the field of computer science, and programming than any one of us can even begin to fathom. True legend.

The same thing can be said for pretty much every invention/innovation ever made even if it was a huge leap from the prior art - but then he was the one who did it and I guess that is what matters at the end

My question is if he didn't create a language like C, would someone else have? Was it such a leap from existing languages?

There are several billion people using many billions of devices every day.From the code in your microwave to massive computing clusters, virtually all of our software can trace its ancestry back to this man's intellectual output.I'm eternally grateful for his life and contributions to humanity.

next_newborn = calloc(1, sizeof(WORLD_CHANGER_ST));

"... the exit status should be nonzero. .."true but it's from P7, "C progamming language", pure K&#38;R.

What if he died peacefully?<pre><code> return 0;</code></pre>

Considering the tragic nature of the situation, the exit status should be nonzero.<pre><code> #include &#60;stdio.h&#62;
 
 int main(void) {
 printf("goodbye, world\n");
 return 1;
 }</code></pre>

It's true, he preferred the brackets formatted this way.

You mean:<pre><code> #include &#60;stdio.h&#62;
 
 main() {
 printf("goodbye, world\n");
 }</code></pre>

Style considerations in the other replies aside, this had the same hit-you-in-the-chest impact on me as the Jobs' logo. Kudos.

<pre><code> #include &#60;stdio.h&#62; 
 main()
 {
 printf("goodbye, world\n");
 }</code></pre>

c--; /* to echo a sentiment expressed on g+ */

I still have K&#38;R on my shelf.Thank you, DMR.

No one is better than anyone else really. dmr's work has likely touched more lives than most, but like many researchers and programmers, his work is mostly "behind the scenes" and not flashy or glamorous and he probably wanted it that way.We on HN realize the significance of his work, but most other people won't and that's OK as we all benefit from the things he did whether we realize it or not.

Please stop, this isn't a contest, and I for one don't want to see HN kicked in the junk again over it. dmr wasn't a household name simply because most people lack the background to see the clarity and suitability of his work.As much as I cringe at seeing "undefined behavior" robustness compromises today, when he started they were absolutely necessary, and he got our profession through one of its most difficult periods. We few know what we owe him.

[..] The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth." - Steve Jobs

Regard Ross Snyder, I distinctly recall a televised report about it on BBC News.

&#62; In the realm of news, almost no one knows who Dennis Ritchie was.I can attest to this. Here at work we work almost exclusively in C (embedded devices) and my boss had no idea who Dennis Ritchie is.

In the realm of news, almost no one knows who Dennis Ritchie was. You can lament that fact (obviously, to anyone even remotely related to computing he was a figure of paramount importance), but it's ridiculous to expect the mainstream press to understand that importance.Analogies are tenuous, but when Michael Jackson died, it was obviously big news. It was all over television. Nobody reported when Ross Snyder‡ died, even though his influence was of great importance. That's the way these things work.‡If anyone didn't know, Ross invented the multitrack recorder, one of the most transformative tools in music production.

I for one wish the black bar would stop darkening our door.  Both men were great in their own ways and made large contributions to our world.

RIP Dennis. Now that's a guy worth mourning about.I'll check CNN and the BBC to see their special reports, surely if they had them when some marketing CEO kicked the bucket they'll give at least ten times the amount of coverage to a man who was 100 times his better!

Two visi0naries lost in one week.  Unfortunately, Dennis Ritchie's passing will not get the level of coverage of Steve Jobs, but he deserves it.  Without his critical contributions, the UNIX core of Steve Jobs' great products could not exist ...

Exactly. When I first found out about dmr, I really really hoped the stories will flood in here after the massive Steve Jobs amount. Not to take anything away from Steve, but dmr is far more important in my opinion, and I'm sure many other geeks would agree. I'm glad he isn't just quietly being forgotten like I feared he would.

Not the Apple II or the original Mac really (which was all Pascal and 68k ASM). (Lisa definitely took cues from Unix.) Not detracting from Ritchie's contributions, but be fair.Even Ritche was building on B and Algol.

Including all of the tech that Steve Jobs had a significant impact on.

If you have used technology of any sort over the last few decades there's a pretty decent chance that you've used technology that Steve Jobs had a significant impact on.But the chances are 100.00% that you've used technology Dennis Ritchie has had a deeply profound impact on.

RIP Dennis Ritchie.
I can't honestly say that I've spent an entire day at work over the last five years without looking at something that was either created by him or inspired from his work.

While this is very sad, I think he would have wanted us to remember that working in a field so young that you have occasion to mourn people who built its foundations is inherently exciting.

It's a testament to the quality and reach of his vision that these words are coming to you via systems that recognisably Unix and written in C _40 years_ after Ritchie (and colleagues) created their progenitors. His work has literally defined generations of operating systems and languages and seems likely to continue to do so for some time. What a great...

<a href="http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/ken-and-den.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/ken-and-den.jpg</a><a href="http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/chist.html" rel="nofollow">http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/chist.html</a><a href="http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/hist.html" rel="nofollow">http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/hist.html</a>

I wish I could say I met the man, but it doesn't really matter to me because in a way I've got to kinda know him indirectly through his work; through UNIX-likes and what little I know of C.So RIP, you crazy tinkerer.

Live free or die!Dennis lives somewhere in time.

I noticed every computer around me, be it a laptop, a phone, a TV or a router, runs some kind of Unix.

Goodbye Dennis.  You were a giant.  You'll be missed.

I learned BASIC and 6502 assembly in high school then went to college where the main language was Modula-2 on an IBM 370. I hated Modula-2 and wondered how people actually wrote those cool programs on PCs. It just seems like all the possibilities of assembly really weren't there. It just seemed wrong.Took an optional language class in C which used the K&#38;R C book (draft ANSI C edition) taught on the VAX and was finally able to say "Oh, I get it now". Bought Turbo C 2.0 and had a blast.This is just a truly sucky month.

Dennis Ritchie. Hello World. May he rest in peace.

The K&#38;R textbook is still my programming "bible". I don't use C on a regular basis, or at least as not as much as I'd like to, but still refer to it, even so. IMO, people should learn C first - teaches the right principles.

DMR was one of my heroes. Rest In Peace Sir.I learned C from the first edition of K&#38;R back in 1989 (iirc) on an Atari ST using the Sozobon C compiler. Happy memories (except for learning to combine pointers and loops and null terminated strings correctly! :-)

It almost seems impossible to imagine men like Ritchie leaving us. His efforts helped usher in the modern computing age.While he is no longer with us in person, may his legacy never be forgotten by those of use who have had the honor to stand on his titanic shoulders.Truly he will be missed.

I'm didn't know the man but it's always sad to see one of the greats fall.I seem to have mislaid my copy of the 'The C Programming Language', which is a shame as it is one of the few of the many programming books I have purchased over the years that continues to be relevant in this fast changing (and exiting) field.RIP dmr, my condolences to your family and friends. You will be missed and your contributions appreciated by hackers the world over.

His great works had such amazing style -- simple, elegant, meaningful, effective. I think this sentence, which he not only co-authored but also executed on, summarizes it in plain English, all the more so when you read it from the small book in your hands."C is not a big language, and it is not well served by a big book."These words have guided my writing as much as anything in Elements of Style.

Rest in Peace, Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie. True Hacker Knight, Shinning Armor.This is just for you. You will be missed.

Damn.That hit me harder than I would have thought possible.The family of man is poorer for his passing, regardless of how few may know why.Wow. I don't know if I'm at a loss for words, or have too much to say, but I'm really having a hard time putting my thoughts into a brief post.Rest in peace, dmr.

RIP. It seems they are into a big project up there.

thanks  Ritchie,for your great contribution, Without you ,I'm sure,we won't be what we are now. RIP.

For example, explaining the history of operator precedence in C:<a href="http://groups.google.com/group/net.lang.c/msg/3651ddf298937dc0" rel="nofollow">http://groups.google.com/group/net.lang.c/msg/3651ddf298937d...</a>

Hit reload a few times and it'll come up. Google Groups has been flaky for a while now.

"Sorry, we could not find any information on research!dmr." -- googleWell then, here are some of his first usenet posts: <a href="http://olduse.net/blog/Dennis_Ritchie/" rel="nofollow">http://olduse.net/blog/Dennis_Ritchie/</a>The one on dsw is especially good.<pre><code> SYNOPSIS
 (put number in console switches)
 dsw
 core</code></pre>

:( Thank you, Dennis.dmr posted to Usenet quite often over the years:<a href="http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?user=research!dmr" rel="nofollow">http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?user=research!dmr</a><a href="http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?user=dmr@research.UUCP" rel="nofollow">http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?user=dmr@research.UU...</a><a href="http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?user=dmr@alice.UUCP" rel="nofollow">http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?user=dmr@alice.UUCP</a><a href="http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?user=dmr@research.att.com" rel="nofollow">http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?user=dmr@research.at...</a><a href="http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?user=dmr@bell-labs.com" rel="nofollow">http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?user=dmr@bell-labs.c...</a>

I still remember the first time I picked up K&#38;R. I tried my best to devour it. The technical prose makes the book a tour de force.
Every time I write a new "hello world" program from now on, I will add a "Thanks dmr" at the end.
May you rest in peace dmr.

int main(int argc, char argv[]) 
{
　struct passwd pw = getpwnam('dmr');
　restInPeace(pw-&#62;pw_uid);
　exit(0);
}

Goodbye, Dennis. It's been just over 30 years since I picked up K&#38;R and started programming in C and using 7th Edition Unix on a PDP-11/45. And C is still among the languages I program in today. You'll be missed.

I didn't have anything to do with any of the Steve Jobs Apple logo tributes, but here's my take on a Dennis one:<a href="https://plus.google.com/109834643338395014064/posts/CWHKvH7dawg" rel="nofollow">https://plus.google.com/109834643338395014064/posts/CWHKvH7d...</a>

Is it possible for you to share the awk tarball you mention?

<a href="http://blog.tagxedo.com/rip-dennis-ritchie-father-of-unix-and-c-58975" rel="nofollow">http://blog.tagxedo.com/rip-dennis-ritchie-father-of-unix-an...</a> is good (second post on HN right now, so you've probably seen it]

Any chance we could get the guy who did the Steve Jobs Apple logo to take a wack at doing one for Dennis?I've never met Dennis but I've talked to him on the phone a bit, and exchanged a pile of email over the years, all about various Unix topics. Though I was nobody, he was always polite, always patient, always willing to pass on knowledge. I'm quite grateful to him for taking the time to exchange ideas and polish them.bwk is the same way. We were working on extending awk to be, well, different (we made awk scripts be part of awk, so any statement could be a script and it could pipe to another script). I talked bwk about the idea and asked if I could do on top of his awk and the next day a tarball showed up of ~bwk/awk, had the source, all the regressions, the source the awk book, everything.I love these guys, they did a lot of things I admire.

Either you're quite old or your professor forgot about Alan Turing. :/

When I was a student a professor joked that computer science wasn't really a science because all its founders were still alive. Well, now it certainly must be one.

To paraphrase the epitaph of Sir Christopher Wren - if you seek his monument, log in.

I you have ever used a computer or any programming language , it means that you used some thing that has Dennis Ritchie's impact.

Because of Dennis Ritchie I can type these words and others can read them.;_;

I remember attending one of his lectures on Plan 9 back in 1996 at Bell Labs. It's a shame he's gone now.

I'll have to admit, I didn't know who Dennis Ritchie was. I remember seeing his name on the Unix Haters Handbook but that was it. 
Noticing the black bar, I googled and now, I'm enlightened. It's a pity many will never know his name or his contributions but if it means anything, this here Computer Science student would like to say Thank You Mr. Ritchie for all you've done.

Condolences to family and friends. C was my first programming language. Owe a lot to this man.What a sad week.

I read K&#38;R at university in 1986 and found it to be a model of clarity, spent a year supporting Turbo C for Borland when it was first released (that improved my language knowledge no end)Biggest problem was the first Turbo C compiler folded floating point constant division back to front which makes one of the early programs in K&#38;R (Centigrade to Farenheit conversion) fail. That got fixed fairly quickly.He leaves behind a truly amazing legacy of C, *nix and the K&#38;R book.

K&#38;R is the only book that I have currently three copies. Two editions in English and one in Greek. RIP DR

I'm far more struck by this than Steve Jobs' death.

"I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up."Thank you for being one of ours, RIP Dennis

Those photos, scissors, screwdriver and even the salami probably involved using a computer at some stage. So he did contribute indirectly.

Just looking at the stuff on my desk, the only things Dennis Ritchie has not directly or indirectly contributed to are two photos, a pair of scissors, a screwdriver and a salami.Cellphone? Check. Harddisks? Screens? USB devices? TAN generator? Wacom tablet? Applet remote? Mac mini? MacBook Pro? Camera? Check, check, check.Thanks, Dennis Ritchie, for helping to create the foundations of computing as we know it.

This has been a sad week.Whenever I'm learning a new language, I always look for but fail to find a book with the clarity, conciseness and completeness of K&#38;R.

C, like thousands of other computer science students, was the first language I learnt.I have always felt that a language is only as popular as the niche it serves. For C that niche started out as OS implementation and expanded into driver programming, UI programming, embedded systems programming, graphics programming, and many many more disciplines.There was Fortran and PL/1 before C, what made C so popular? I will let dmr's friend Brian Kernighan answer it:C is perhaps the best balance of expressiveness and efficiency that has ever been seen in programming languages. At the time it was developed, efficiency mattered a great deal: machines were slow and had small memories, so one had to get close to the efficiency of assembler. C did this for system programming tasks--writing compilers, operating systems and tools. It was so close to the machine that you could see what the code would be (and it wasn't hard to write a good compiler), but it still was safely above the instruction level and a good enough match to all machines that one didn't think about specific tricks for specific machines. Once C came along, there no longer was any reason for any normal programmer to use assembly language. It's still my favorite language; if I were marooned on a desert island with only one compiler, it would have to be for C.[1]If I have to pick one reason for C's popularity, it would be pointers (both function and data) alongwith type casting. IMHO this was the combination that not only gave you full control of the underlying hardware (other languages had done that too) but most importantly it enabled other programming paradigms, (functional, object oriented etc.), while doing that.Thanks for introducing us to the wonderful world of computer programming. RIP DMR.1. <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7035" rel="nofollow">http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7035</a>

For some odd reason I pulled my 1978 version of The C Programming Language off the shelf and it's been on my desk for the past few weeks.Beneath the copyright notice it reads:"This book was set in Times Roman and Courier 12 by the authors, using a Graphic Systems phototypesetter driven by a PDP-11/70 running under the UNIX operating system."Probably on a VT100 with drafts printed on a DECWriter.Quiet. Brilliant. Deliberate. Influential. Modest.May you rest in peace.

RIP. His life exemplifies:“Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something, or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing. Sharing Knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes.”- Peter Senge

Мир праху твоему, пусть земля будет пухом. /* Рус. /
Rest In Peace / Eng. */

RIP Dennis.I was an uninterested Computer science student bored with writing stupid BASIC programs. Then I got introduced to C which made me realize what studying computers is all about. Then I got to know Unix and Linux. I still remember the day I got my Unix login. I was the first student to get one! My college projects (Linux clusters, routers), my geek friends, my first job and my professional life - all got started by learning C &#38; Unix in a remote university lab thousands of miles away. I'm sure this is a story shared by millions. Thanks dmr! You are a legend!

i'm from russia and very bad know english...RIP

Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died