The idols in my life are dropping like flies...

So, most of you know that Steve Jobs is dead.  If this is news to you and you're sitting in stunned silence, welcome back from having your body preserved!  We've managed to revive you from your basically dead frozen state.  Please move along, Walt Disney is next.

But no one tell him about the Jews.

Anyway, yes, Jobs is dead.  And yes, its is rather sad.  But, as any real computer science student will tell you, Jobs' success was built on the innovations of the people who came before him.  What we really remember Jobs for isn't that he wrote any groundbreaking new software in CS-- he was a marketing and application genius.  He took what was already around and managed to package it in a way that was cool.

In a nutshell, Jobs would have been nothing if it was for people like Dennis Ritchie.  Who, unfortunately, has also recently passed away.  I've taken it upon myself to make sure that all of you give a passing fuck.

Ritchie wrote this book- it is more holy than the Bible.  And more practical.

You see, Jobs spent most of his life working on one platform: the programming language C.  Everything Apple has ever done has been based on the operating system Unix.  And as you probably figured out by now, Unix was written exclusively in C.  When Jobs left Apple for a while, guess what most of his work was in?  Writing really bad additions (that no one really uses anymore) to the C programming language.

And guess who wrote C?  Ritchie.  Even better, guess who helped write the Unix operating system?  Ritchie.  Even Ken Thompson, Unix's other main author, gets more press than Ritchie, but that might be because Ken's beard is so intense, it has probably achieved sentience by this point.

Its the source of all his powers.

In fact, C is even more awesome than you realize.  Almost any operating system written these days is written in C.  Windows 7?  C.  Linux?  C.  A bunch of other OS's you've never heard of?  C.  If you have half a brain, you've got to have realized something by this point:

This man revolutionized computer science.  Any modern day computer genius you know of- Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, that guy that "knows a lot about computers" that keeps fixing yours when you get a porn virus- all of them have been working on top of the shoulders of pretty much one man: Dennis Ritchie.  If you use computers in any way shape or form, even just to turn the damn thing on, you're profiting from the work of Dennis Ritchie.

I have a shrine to the man at home.  I'll be sacrificing a lamb tonight for his safe passage in the afterlife.  You better give at least a slight damn.

Godspeed great one.  We in computer science will ever remember you.