It is hard to write eulogies about people you have never met. Dennis M Ritchie's work has influenced me a lot in my tech field. UNIX and C were two of the main projects he worked on and two of the things from which I have been making a living. If it wasn't for them, I may not be working in software engineering.

Dennis M Ritchie sadly passed away today at 70.

The Economist has a good summary of Dennis Ritchie work. The article is from 2004, before iPhone, iPad and Android, which are the most popular consumer products that are based off UNIX.

I spent my professional life either fiddling with operating systems like AIX, BSD, iOS, Linux, MacOS X, Solaris, based on or derived from UNIX, or writing software in C, C++, Objective-C. Thank you Mr Ritchie for your invaluable contribution to computing.