Dennis Ritchie

What they built

Creator of the C programming language (1972) and co-creator of Unix at Bell Labs with Ken Thompson. Co-author, with Brian Kernighan, of The C Programming Language ("K&R", 1978). Later contributed to Plan 9 and Inferno. Turing Award 1983, National Medal of Technology 1998, Japan Prize 2011. Died October 12, 2011.

In their own words

• "C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success." — The Development of the C Language (1993). Ritchie was plain about the accidents and pragmatics baked into C.
• "What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which fellowship could form." — 1980 lecture on the evolution of Unix. He framed Unix as much as a social artifact as a technical one.
• "The greatest danger to good computer science research today may be excessive relevance." — Turing Award lecture, CACM 1984. A near-inversion of how his work was later marketed.
• On Unix's flaws, asked at the 2011 Japan Prize ceremony: "There are lots of little things — I don't even want to think about going down the list." — IEEE Spectrum, May 2011. Months before his death.
• "I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the demigodic party." — USENET, 1984. A rare self-deflating remark about his deification in the Unix community.
• "I think the Linux phenomenon is quite delightful, because it draws so strongly on the basis that Unix provided." — LinuxFocus interview, 1999. He was generous about Linux, not defensive about BSD or Plan 9.

Principles as they articulated them

• Languages and systems are shaped by accident and expedience; pretending otherwise lies.
• The point of a system is the community it lets form around it — fellowship, not just productivity.
• Research should not be driven by relevance; the good stuff comes from play.
• Plain prose about your own work beats mythologising it.

What surprised me in research

• Ritchie's last public statement of substance was his Japan Prize interview in May 2011. He died five months later; Rob Pike announced it on Google+ and it was initially overshadowed by Steve Jobs's death the same week.
• He had retired from Bell Labs in 2007 as head of the System Software Department after 40 years — the transition from AT&T to Lucent to Alcatel-Lucent played out underneath him, and he largely stopped publishing in the 2000s.
• "C has the power of assembly language and the convenience of… assembly language" (Wired, 2011) — the self-deprecating framing is closer to his actual voice than the reverent quotes that circulate.

Recent or later work

Ritchie's later career was mostly quiet maintenance of Plan 9 and Inferno and administrative leadership at Bell Labs. He published very little in his final decade. The Japan Prize, Turing, and National Medal came to him; he did not campaign. He did not go to startups or academia.

Sources

• https://spectrum.ieee.org/dennis-ritchie-1941-2011 — Dennis Ritchie (1941–2011) — spectrum.ieee.org
• https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie — Dennis Ritchie quotes — wikiquote.org
• https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/ — Dennis Ritchie Home Page — nokia.com/bell-labs
• https://www.cnn.com/2011/10/14/tech/innovation/dennis-ritchie-obit-bell-labs/index.html — The shoulders Steve Jobs stood on — cnn.com