Inspired by California Governor Edmund Brown’s declaration that October 16th would be Steve Jobs day, Tim O’Reilly wrote in O’Reilly Radar:
I don’t have the convening power of a Governor Brown, but for those of us around the world who care, I hereby declare this Sunday, October 30 to be Dennis Ritchie Day! Let’s remember the contributions of this computing pioneer.
For C and Unix, as well as all the goodies that came forth from their creation – from the concept of platform-independent programming languages and operating systems to the internet to the platforms we use today at Shopify (we develop on the Mac, deploy to Linux and procrastinate on our iPhones, iPad and Androids) to “Hello, World!”, we’re taking this day to pay homage to Dennis Ritchie. As like to say: “Mr. Ritchie, I salute you with a filet mignon on a flaming sword!”
The folks at O’Reilly are also marking Ritchie’s passing with a half-price sale on sale on C, C++, Linux and Unix ebooks and videos for one day only. If you’ve been meaning to snag some C or Unix books, this is your chance to get a discount – but today only!
This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.