Manuel Martín @ 🏠

Software Engineer at ING

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

Dennis Ritchie invented C in 1972, co-built Unix in 1969, and his code is running inside every device you are reading this on right now and the colleague who announced his death had to do it through a Google+ post because no journalist thought to check.

He worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey for 44 years. He never gave a keynote. He never ran a company. He never appeared on a magazine cover. He just wrote code that became the invisible foundation everything else is built on.

Here is what he actually built, and why it matters more than almost anything that happened in tech.

In 1969, Bell Labs had just walked away from one of the most ambitious computing projects in history. The Multics project, a joint effort between MIT, Bell Labs, and General Electric, had collapsed under its own weight. Too complex. Too expensive. Too slow. Bell Labs pulled out.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie refused to let the ideas die.

Working in a small office in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Thompson wrote the first version of Unix in three weeks during the summer of 1969. One week for the file system. One week for the process management. One week for the command shell. Ritchie was working alongside him, and when the system needed a language that could express what they were building, he built one.

In 1972 he completed C.

C was not just another programming language. It was a different philosophy about what a programming language should be. Before C, most systems code was written in assembly, which meant every program was tied to the specific hardware it ran on. You could not move code between machines. You rewrote it from scratch every time.

C changed that. It sat close enough to the hardware to be fast, but abstract enough to run on anything. When Thompson rewrote the Unix kernel in C in 1973, it became the first operating system that could be picked up and moved to a completely different machine without starting over. Portability was a new idea. Ritchie made it real.

The branching that followed is almost impossible to overstate.

Unix spread from Bell Labs to universities. At Berkeley, it became BSD. BSD became the foundation of macOS and iOS. Unix influenced Linus Torvalds, who built Linux in 1991. Linux now runs every Android phone, every major web server, every supercomputer on the Top500 list, and the overwhelming majority of cloud infrastructure at AWS, Google, and Microsoft.

C became the parent language of C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, and Objective-C. Rob Pike, who worked across the hall from Ritchie at Bell Labs for 20 years, said it plainly: "The browsers are written in C. The Unix kernel that the entire internet runs on is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they're not, they're written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C."

Ritchie won the Turing Award in 1983. He won the National Medal of Technology in 1998, presented by President Clinton. He was head of System Software Research at Bell Labs for decades.

He answered emails from strangers with technical questions until the end of his life. His home address stayed listed in the phone book. His colleague Brian Kernighan, who co-authored the definitive C textbook with him, said Ritchie was a private person who did no self-salesmanship. That was not false modesty. It was just who he was.

He died on October 12, 2011, at his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. He was 70. He had been ill for some time. The world did not notice until Rob Pike posted a quiet announcement on Google+, and the news spread through the programming community in hushed tones.

No front pages. No tributes from heads of state. No candlelight vigils outside corporate campuses.

The device you are reading this on runs code that traces directly back to what he built. So does the server that delivered it to you. So does the browser or app you opened to get here.

Most people will never know his name.

The ones who built everything you use every day do.

[Web Design Museum @WebDesignMuseum]

Happy 71st Birthday, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web!

[Web Design Museum @WebDesignMuseum]

On 5 June 2002 Mozilla (also known as Mozilla .org ) released the Mozilla 1.0 web browser. The basis for Mozilla 1.0 was Gecko, an open-source rendering engine.

#InternetHistory

[Ele @Nisstika]

Al conductor de autobús que se ha levantado en una parada y ha dicho "Los móviles con auriculares, por favor. Un respeto a los demás": Te deseo que nunca vuelvas a quemarte con una croqueta, siempre recuerdes tus contraseñas y encuentres aparcamiento a la primera.

[Umesh Kumar Yadav @Umesh__digital]

Dennis Ritchie created C in the early 1970s without Google, Stack Overflow, GitHub, or any AI ( Claude, Cursor, Codex) assistant.

- No VC funding.
- No viral launch.
- No TED talk.
- Just two engineers at Bell Labs. A terminal. And a problem to solve.

He built a language that fit in kilobytes.

50 years later, it runs everything.

Linux kernel. Windows. macOS.

Every iPhone. Every Android.

NASA’s deep space probes.

The International Space Station.

> Python borrowed from it.
> Java borrowed from it.
> JavaScript borrowed from it.

If you have ever written a single line of code in any language, you did it in Dennis Ritchie’s shadow.

He died in 2011.
The same week as Steve Jobs.
Jobs got the front pages.
Ritchie got silence.

This Legend deserves to be celebrated.

[Adam Tornhill @AdamTornhill]

After coding 100% agentic for 6 months, my key observation is that software design is more important than ever.

[owen.sol @owen_venter]

Programming used to put me into FLOW state often. That’s a big part of why I fell in love with it. Late night missions building games, apps, whatever, it felt great.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has a great quote on this:

“The best moments in our lives… occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult or worthwhile.”

AI has kind of nuked the personal challenge part of that. I don’t fall into those same FLOW states nearly as often anymore. It’s a strange position to be in because I’m undeniably more productive, but some of the joy is gone. I still love building software, but now the enjoyment comes more from seeing products come to life and have real-world impact than from the actual process of writing the code.

I’ll miss the deep flow states that came from fighting code for hours into the night, but I feel like I do need to find new areas that still offer that same sense of challenge.

[Radical Living @RadicalFalk]

What 10 Years in Spain Does To You 🍗

[Ikisabi @ikisabicanal]

El Señor de los Anillos dirigida por George Lucas 😂

[Rita Iglesias @rita_codes]

why does telling Claude your idea feel easier than telling actual people 💀
be honest…

#Claude #DevMemes #ProgrammerHumor #AITools #AI

[Paco Arnau @ciudadfutura]

Una lección de periodismo. XD

[Seb ⚛️ ThisWeekInReact.com @sebastienlorber]

Speaking of maps, "multiple import maps" are also coming in Firefox 151 nightly, so they could be baseline newly available soon

[Spaceballs The X Account @Grunt2A]

Now that Artemis II has launched we have 10 days to get everyone on Earth a Planet of the Apes costume so we can do something hilarious when the astronauts return 😁

[Jesús López @_JesusLopez_]

Una genialidad en la TV británica, sobre cómo se toman sus vacaciones los ingleses en España

[Daniel Hnyk @hnykda]

LiteLLM HAS BEEN COMPROMISED, DO NOT UPDATE. We just discovered that LiteLLM pypi release 1.82.8. It has been compromised, it contains litellm_init.pth with base64 encoded instructions to send all the credentials it can find to remote server + self-replicate. link below

[Mark Gadala-Maria @markgadala]

Lord of the Rings x Pawn Shop might be the greatest AI video ever created.

Credit u/YouAreNowDUM

[Jon Cortázar @Jon_Cortazar]

We've just made Gradius, except it's 100% ASCII based, you can even save your screenshots as .txt files.

[Zigor Aldama 齐戈 @zigoraldama]

En la gala de Año Nuevo de esta noche en la televisión china ha sucedido esto: hombres contra robots.
Espectacular y un poco tenebroso por el futuro que llega.

[Star Wars Culture @SWCultureLive]

Oh yeah, it’s all coming together.