RIP
October 13th, 2011 | Published in Uncategorized
I’ve been pondering what I might say about the passing of Steve Jobs last week. I’ve used Macs the entire time I’ve worked at the University and the year before I started here I taught Computer Literacy and Programming to Middle School and High School kinds on Apple ][e’s, so he’s unquestionably had an effect on my life. Unlike most geeks, Jobs never forgot that computers are used by human beings, and we need more of that.
This morning I saw reports that Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language and one of the original developers on Unix, has also died. Tim Bray has a remembrance. C has never been my favorite programming language (and while the comments on this at Bray’s post were tacky I have to share the doubts about null-terminated byte strings being a good idea) but he certainly did a lot to push the use of computers forward.
It won’t be too much longer until the “digital natives” will outnumber those of us who grew up in a world without ubiquitous computing. I hope we don’t forget the people who made it happen.