Did you ever wonder if there’s a world that is part of your world, of what you do, what you use, but you don’t know about?

Clearly, before the nineteenth century things were pretty easy: The tools people used came from other people living in their town or village, houses were built with the help of relatives and if somebody bought something like food or textiles, they mostly bought it from the guy who produced it or ran a shop were things were sold a relative produced. Since then many things have changed, factories and globalisation made many creators of things to parts of impersonal companies.

And in the last century, with the rise of the computer something came into peoples lives, that is not really a thing, one cannot touch it, but it is also a tool, something people use: software. You buy or download it for free, if it’s open source, and take it for granted. Sometimes, if it functions bad, people complain, mostly over or to the company or the group, which developed this software. But many people, as myself, never really say “That’s a f*cking good program, I’m really thankful to the guy (or girl) who wrote it!”.

Well, this is the layer I’m working at, mostly I write software for a product my company sells and our customers never have really contact with me or my creations because all they see is the user-interface and that’s the field of another guy in our company. If something doesn’t work, they complain to our service hotline and if everything is okay, they don’t say anything at all, mostly.

But I’m not at the lowest level: to write software, I also need tools and I do not mean just the editor I use to write my programs. There are several other things I use, but just take for granted, for instance the language I write my programs in. To help those, who do not know, what I’m talking about, understand: Developers usually don’t write software a language a computer understands directly. Software is written in a human-readable language and then translated into machine-readable language by a software that is called compiler. One of the most used languages is called C, it is a comparably old language, that has advantages and disadvantages, but let’s get back on track here.

The language C was invented by Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, who died on 8th of October this year. Besides inventing C, he helped creating Unix, which is the blueprint for most modern operating systems used today (not Windows, but Linux or MacOS X are designed after the concepts used in Unix). Not many people know this guy, but everyone in the western hemisphere has used something that his inventions helped creating. And don’t just think about smartphones and computers, Linux, written in C, is a clone of Unix and runs on washing machines, behind displays at airports or train stations or in modern television sets. Many software is written in C, independent of the operating system it runs on. The webserver, that has sent this website to you, is most likely written in C, too.

Well, as this great and quiet guy died after being seriously ill for a long time, I would like to thank him for the way his ideas shaped the world today. And I hope this little rant of mine inspired some people to try to look under the surface of software, as it is not just a thing, most likely it’s the creation of someone, who put his time, his ambition and hopefully his love into it, hoping this small piece could improve the world a bit.

Thank you, Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie.