Death of an icon
One of my all time heroes died this past week at the age of 70. A man without whom modern coding would not exist, and yet news reports have missed this sad event. I sent the following email to NZStuff in the hope that some coverage will belatedly occur. The younger iOS generation should know about dmr and what he did for all of us.
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Hi,
There's been a lot of press coverage over the death of Steve Jobs, and yes, it's very sad and he was a great influence to the way we use technology and was one of my heroes purely because of his passion for IT, but an even greater influence on computing also passed away last week and there's been no mention of his passing.
Dennis Ritchie, aka dmr, the inventor of the C programming language, co-creator of Unix and all round nice guy passed away on the 8th October. Without dmr there wouldn't have been anything for Steve Jobs or any other younger generation of developers and inventors to build new ideas on.
The C programming language is the foundation for many other languages and I think it's an horrendous oversight that there has been no coverage of dmr's death, no review of his life, his work or his contribution to modern computing. The guy was a genius and is a hero to many of us who have been into computers for more than the last 10 years.
Please rectify this oversight, dmr deserves as much, if not more, coverage than Steve Jobs.
Regards,
Amanda Jackson.
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