Dennis Ritchie, b. 1941

By Ellen Ullman

Hello, world: those were the words that appeared on the screen once you had programmed and run the iconic first example in the book “The C Programming Language,” which Dennis Ritchie, the creator of C, co-wrote with Brian Kernighan. I remember that slim volume’s revelatory power when I read it — its generous, collegial style, more a talk with presumed equals than a textbook. I still have on my shelf the copy I used, a first edition. The pencil scratches seem to indicate I was figuring out what the hell I was doing.

I was a self-taught programmer, and it was through Ritchie that I came to understand the layers of software that worked beneath the screens and printers and keyboards and mice. The newness of C’s conception — and the elegance of it — was that the language was both “high” and “low.” Higher-level languages — like Cobol and Fortran — kept you out of the innards of the machine. “Lower-level” languages — called “assembler” — worked on only specific hardware. Closed environments dominated the computing world of the 1970s and early ’80s. An operating system written for a Hewlett-Packard computer ran only on H.P. computers; I.B.M. controlled its software from chips up to the user interfaces.

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Continua qui: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/12/22/magazine/the-lives-they-lived.html#view=dennis_ritchie