"The tools that Dennis built — and their direct descendants — run pretty much everything today."

RIP Dennis Ritchie.

Those tools were more than inventive bundles of computer code. The C language and Unix reflected a point of view, a different philosophy of computing than what had come before....

Minicomputers represented a step in the democratization of computing, and Unix and C were designed to open up computing to more people and collaborative working styles....

C was designed for systems programmers who wanted to get the fastest performance from operating systems, compilers and other programs. “C is not a big language — it’s clean, simple, elegant,” [said Brian Kernighan, a computer scientist at Princeton University who worked with Mr. Ritchie at Bell Labs.] “It lets you get close to the machine, without getting tied up in the machine.”

I must admit I'd never heard of the man, but... thanks.