Jobs and Ritchie

Steve Jobs died just over a week ago and, of course, there was hullabaloo galore. Just this past weekend, Dennis Ritchie passed and plenty of people are just learning of it now. For those who didn't follow that link, Dennis Ritchie was the co-creator of both the C programming language and the Unix operating system/kernel. For those of us who work with software for a living, the impact of his work cannot be understated. Still, I can't help wanting to slap my friends and colleagues who are expressing indignation about the comparative lack of outpouring.

Obviously, the entire technological landscape depends on Ritchie's work. C and its various extensions and offspring have dominated the programming landscape forever, and most of the web lives on servers running Unix-like operating systems (not to mention Mac OSX). But most people don't care about what makes the things they use work. If they did, we'd be a society of engineers and scientists. People care about how well things work, and Jobs was a master of providing technology that simply worked better -- or at least more intuitively -- than anything else out there.

More than that, Jobs was an incredibly public person managing an even more prominent company that virtually everybody has strong feelings about in one direction or the other. As near to the end as he could, he was keeping himself visible and relevant as he promoted the work and products of his company. What has Ritchie done in the last 40 years? I can't find anything other than winning awards for the contributions of C and Unix and sitting on a number of research boards.

So, while it's certainly sad that so few people even knew that Ritchie died, don't bring Steve Jobs into things. Their legacies have nothing in common, and we shouldn't expect remotely the same reaction.