{"id":4936,"date":"2011-10-14T21:24:30","date_gmt":"2011-10-15T02:24:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/?p=4936"},"modified":"2011-10-14T21:24:30","modified_gmt":"2011-10-15T02:24:30","slug":"ripdennis-ritchie-the-shoulders-steve-jobs-stood-on-wired-enterprise-wired-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/2011\/10\/14\/ripdennis-ritchie-the-shoulders-steve-jobs-stood-on-wired-enterprise-wired-com\/","title":{"rendered":"RIP::Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On &#124; Wired Enterprise &#124; Wired.com"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>\u201cWhen Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified. But Dennis had a bigger effect, and the public doesn\u2019t even know who he is,\u201d says Rob Pike, the programming legend and current Googler who spent 20 years working across the hall from Ritchie at the famed Bell Labs.<br \/>\nOn Wednesday evening, with a post to Google+, Pike announced that Ritchie had died at his home in New Jersey over the weekend after a long illness, and though the response from hardcore techies was immense, the collective eulogy from the web at large doesn\u2019t quite do justice to Ritchie\u2019s sweeping influence on the modern world. Dennis Ritchie is the father of the C programming language, and with fellow Bell Labs researcher Ken Thompson, he used C to build UNIX, the operating system that so much of the world is built on \u2014 including the Apple empire overseen by Steve Jobs.<br \/>\n\u201cPretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX,\u201d Pike tells Wired. \u201cThe browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel \u2014 that pretty much the entire Internet runs on \u2014 is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they\u2019re not, they\u2019re written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. And all of the network hardware running these programs I can almost guarantee were written in C.<br \/>\n\u201cIt\u2019s really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did.\u201d<br \/>\nvia <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wiredenterprise\/2011\/10\/thedennisritchieeffect\/\">Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cWhen Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified. But Dennis had a bigger effect, and the public doesn\u2019t even know who he is,\u201d says Rob Pike, the programming legend and current Googler who spent 20 years working across the hall from Ritchie at the famed &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/2011\/10\/14\/ripdennis-ritchie-the-shoulders-steve-jobs-stood-on-wired-enterprise-wired-com\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;RIP::Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On &#124; Wired Enterprise &#124; Wired.com&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,81],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reposts","category-rip"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4936\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}