Friday, October 14, 2011

R.I.P Dennis Ritchie - Creator of C and Unix

I made a living for few years teaching C and Unix at IT Training Centres and at a city college. Strange, how a person you have never seen in your lifetime and who lived miles across the planet was the source of your Bread and Butter. I was thinking of Dennis Ritchie who passed away a couple of days back. Though i never got a hang of 'pointer to pointer to pointer' and Binary Trees, i was good with Linked Lists and Doubly Linked Lists! And used command line parameters and accessed the kernel of Unix using Shell commands. Few of my friends turned towards Java and Power Builder as they were afraid of "pointers" in C language.

Ironically, many C language enthusiasts in India practiced C using Yashwant Kanetkar's book "Let Us C" rather than Kernighan and Ritchie's book "The C Programming Language." It was again a good example of the difference between the writings of a good writer/teacher and a Subject Matter Expert (SME).

R.I.P Dennis Ritchie and Thank You!

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