There are several billion people using many billions of devices every day.
From the code in your microwave to massive computing clusters, virtually all of our software can trace its ancestry back to this man's intellectual output.
I'm eternally grateful for his life and contributions to humanity.
Exactly. It's hard to even really comprehend how deep his influence goes; we're so surrounded by it's hard to even see it sometimes.
Consider that every single person reading these words are doing so using technology he created -- after all, even if you're not on a UNIX derivative you're probably on an OS and web browser written in C.
How much code is written every day in C and its descendants? How much more in languages that themselves are written in C?
dmr is part of an very small group of computer scientists that truly changed the paradigm of computing for everyone everywhere (Turing, von Neumann, Engelbart, ...) As long as there are ones and zeros his name will be remembered.
What would the world look like if C would have been never invented? I guess our browsers would simply be coded in Turbo Pascal dialect.
And Visual Basic is still huge (#12 on langpop.com). Also someone could reasonably argue that from the concept and ideas SmallTalk and Lisp were way more influential than C.
That said, I feel a bit dirty to make this argument. Dennis Ritchie should be praised for his accomplishments.
Regarding your last point, while the ideas of Smalltalk and especially Lisp are influential, C may have just as much a claim to influence. Both Lisp and C are beautiful abstractions, the assembly languages of two abstract machines. While Lisp is powerful, C is such a profound success because the C abstract machine is very close to how computers actually work.
Absolutely.
Half of the world uses Unix flavours be it linux or any other OS( Mac OSX) , most of the realtime critical apps run on unix.
Most of the primitive codes are written in C , first language most people learn is C(atleast for me).
With Unix and C , he has changed the way people think of computers and the way of talking to them.
Sums up my feelings too. dmr is a legendary computer scientist who in all fairness had more impact on the field of computer science, and programming than any one of us can even begin to fathom. True legend.
The same thing can be said for pretty much every invention/innovation ever made even if it was a huge leap from the prior art - but then he was the one who did it and I guess that is what matters at the end
From the code in your microwave to massive computing clusters, virtually all of our software can trace its ancestry back to this man's intellectual output.
I'm eternally grateful for his life and contributions to humanity.