Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Ritchie, the creator of UNIX and C, died last week at age 70. This follows only a few weeks after the death of Steve Jobs. I found it quite curious, however, that Jobs’ death was front-page news in most newspapers, while so far I’ve waited six days to see if I could see it in any of the newspapers I tend to read, without success. Did anyone happen to see this in their local newspaper?

It’s very curious why the mainstream media pounced over one death but were silent on the other. Ritchie has a much more significant impact on modern computing than Jobs does. UNIX is the direct descendent of almost every modern non-Microsoft OS. These descendents can be found in routers and servers all across the Internet, in Android phones, Mac computers, even in your TiVo. C is one of the widest-used programming languages ever. So why not pay more attention to Ritchie? One could argue that, if he hadn’t invented C and UNIX, someone else would have come and invented, say, PL/2 and MULTOS and the world would be more or less like it is now. Probably true, but on the other hand I’m sure someone would have invented something similar to the iPod and iPhone and iPad even without Jobs.

So maybe it’s just the “cool” factor and it has nothing to do with substance. It’s interesting where the priorities of the mainstream media are.