The Inevitable Dennis Ritchie v/s Steve Jobs Debate

ICON v/s iCON :

Dennis Ritchie

As November gives way to December and we step into my favorite season of the year - Winter, the social networks are awash with , what I'm calling , aptly ( or so I hope ) , the battle of the Turtleneck v/s the Cardigan .

Last month we lost two true icons of our (the IT ) industry .The first was, of course the unexpected death of Steve Jobs ,co-founder of Apple.

Steve Jobs , 56, was the mock black Turtleneck wearing rockstar of the tech world , the marketing genius who took Apple products to the position of practically monopolizing the American markets.

In India,until very recently , Apple ( or Mac) was a term techies would use from time to time to exhibit their superior knowledge of the world of computers. Most of us Indians haven't , even today ,used a Mackintosh PC and probably never will. What , then caused this overflow of “ Remembering Jobs “ status updates on the Facebook pages of techies ,students and laymen alike all across the country ?

Before answering that we come to the next icon , the TRUE icon in the opinion of a smaller but more insistent group of tech savvy netizens who swear by their bible, the humbly titled ,The C Programming language. 

Yes,of course I'm talking about Dennis Ritchie, 70, the creator of C and

UNIX , and arguably , by extension, most of everything that came after.His death ,just a week after Jobs' , brought forth a smaller but nevertheless noticeable influx of internet shares that not only aimed at honoring Ritchie but also to compare his contribution to that of Steve Jobs, to the detriment of the latter. 

a share on a social networking site

Sadly many of those reading this are scratching their heads right about now. So who was Dennis Ritchie ?

The very fact that my word processor , which couldn't have been written without Ritchie's contribution to software programming, doesn't recognize the word “Ritchie” to be valid , shows how unsung this hero was.

Dennis Ritchie wasn’t some billionaire from Silicon Valley who wooed audiences with shiny products and snide comments aimed at his competitors.

No, Dennis Ritchie was a bearded, somewhat disheveled computer scientist who wore cardigan sweaters.Unlike college drop out Jobs, he was a Ph.D, a Harvard University graduate with degrees in Physics and Applied Mathematics.And instead of the glamorous Silicon Valley,he worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.

While Steve Jobs was no doubt brilliant in his own way and his contributions were extremely important to the IT and computer industries, Steve Jobs was not a scientist. Indeed, he had a very

strong sense of style in industrial design, understood what customers wanted, and was a master salesperson and marketing guru. All of these made him a pioneer in the industry.

But inventor ? Not really.

Dennis M. Ritchie , on the other hand, invented and co-invented two key software technologies which directly or indirectly make up the basis of every piece of software in use today.

Sounds overstated ? No , it's true.

The technologies i speak of are , of course the C programming language , and the UNIX operating system.

C is considered to be the first truly portable programming language. In the 40 years or so of its existense, it has been ported to practically every systems architecture and operating system in existence. In 1978, Kernighan and Ritchie published the book “The C Programming Language” .Referred to by many simply as “K&R” ,It is considered to be a computer science masterpiece and a

bible to students and professionals even today. C++ ,a derivative of C is used on a variety of operating systems including every major UNIX derivative including Linux and the Mac, and is the primary

programming language that has been used for Microsoft Windows software development for at least 20 years. Objective -C is what the Mac OS X was written in and also the API that powers iPads and

iPhones. C# , another derivative of C forms the basis of the MS .NET platform , as well as the new Windows Runtime program for Win8. But C’s influence doesn’t end at C language derivatives. Java

,Ruby, Perl and PHP all use syntax introduced in C by Dennis Ritchie.

So it could be said that without the work of Dennis Ritchie, we would have NO modern software , and this is just half of what the great man contributed to computer science. The story of UNIX and its derivatives is impressive on its own as well.

So,while we mourned the death and remembered the life of Apple CEO Steve Jobs last month, Dennis Ritchie — the developer of the software that Apple products run on— died quietly.

And the question I'm asking today is the inevitable one , whose contribution was bigger ? While I , and those of my ilk, will passionately chant Dennis Ritchie , the answer isn't that simple.

True, all Steve Jobs did would be impossible without Ritchie ,but then ,Jobs was the visionary because of whom many software technologies became accessible to the masses instead of remaining as lab

tools, in which case I'm sure Dennis Ritchie would be even less known than he is today.

A young Steve Jobs

Which brings us back to the earlier question.Why was Jobs idolized even in a country where his products were relatively unpopular ?

It was the journey of his life that is an inspiration to many.The story of an adopted kid,who dropped out of college to follow his dreams and become one of the most famous and successful entrepreneurs in the world. The man who stayed hungry and foolish (in his own words).The tech guru with a rockstar persona. It is for his life that he will be remembered best. And all in all Steve Jobs was a visionary. His ability to envision the change that technology could make possible, to package it in ways that attracted masses, and, yes, to sell those ideas at great profit was not just important to progress. It was invaluable.

So for me and mine, for the student and the techie , both these giants remain inspirations , both were equally important .One taught me almost everything i know and the other gave me the belief that I

could take that knowledge out into the world and actually become successful.

Still , since the great Dennis Ritchie's death remained so underplayed in the media , I leave you with

this , in remembrance of the very first coding lesson any of us ever took ,that displayed the message “Hello World” on our computer screens,

/* R.I.P. Dennis Ritchie */
#include<stdio.h>
main()
{
printf("Goodbye World");
}