It is impossible — absolutely impossible — to overstate the debt my profession owes to Dennis Ritchie. I’ve been living in a world he helped invent for over thirty years.
via Tim Bray – Dennis Ritchie. I remember in one of my early Computer Science courses, the professor mentioned that one of the great things about Computer Science is that the field is so young the people who invented the core theory are still alive. That became a little less true today.