printf ("Dennis Ritchie, dead at 70");

Dennis Ritchie, an unsung hero, died yesterday at 70. It's a good bet that you've never heard of him. That's a shame because none of the "insanely great" products by Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Twitter (to name a few) would have been possible without Ritchie. Even the fact that you can read this post is due in part to Ritchie, the quiet soul affectionately known as "dmr." He invented the C programming language and co-created Unix. As Salon's Andrew Leonard put it, our digital world is literally "built out of the tools that he created and their descendants." That includes Apple's Mac iOS, a variant of Unix. Steve Jobs deserves the plaudits he won after his death. But in my book, dmr deserves more. For unlike Jobs, he was not only a genius without a dark side, Ritchie was renowned for his "gentle wit and gentle ways." He had no fiery id to becalm, no super-ego to stroke. It was enough, as ZDNet noted, that his software "satisfied the intellect while freeing programmers to create their dreams." For Ritchie, like Hamlet, the play was the thing. And yet it is the mercurial Jobs who adorns Time's cover instead of the gracious Prometheus who made the Apple mogul possible. Life, alas, proves yet again that it is rarely fair.

Still, I'm certain Ritchie would appreciate this simplest of tributes:

#include [stdio.h]
main()
{
printf ("goodbye, world\n");
}

You may not understand the code. But dmr does. He was living proof that, in the end, nice guys do indeed finish first. Rest in peace, sir.