In what way did Dennis Ritchie influence you? [closed]

Question

How did the work of Dennis Ritchie (1941-2011) influence you as a programmer? Of course, there are the obvious things (C, Unix). For me, the biggest thing (other than coding in C, on Unix, for years) was the writing style in The C Programming Language ("K&R"), which was remarkably terse and yet very clear.

Did you know that very early versions of C used i =- 2; as the syntax for subtracting 2 from i, instead of i -= 2? And the trouble of course is that then i =- 2 would have a different meaning from i = -2, a dangerous whitespace sensitivity. And if you find yourself nodding along with me, remembering this old syntax which never actually saw the light of day outside of Bell Labs, it's because it's reported at the very end of K&R, and you read that because K&R was so dang short that you ran out of things to read before you ran out of patience with the book, and that in itself is a testament to the bold, clean simplicity of the C language.

Answer 1

This tribute has a rather serious problem: as Dennis pointed out years ago:

Although we worked closely together on this book, there was a clear division of labor: Kernighan wrote almost all the expository material, while I was responsible for the appendix containing the reference manual and the chapter on interfacing with the Unix system.

If we're going to go into bits of personal history about Dennis though, perhaps I'll throw out one little bit from long ago on Usenet. The story starts with Clive D.W. Feather saying:

Dennis: please tell this person how wrong he is.

...and rather than giving Dennis time to reply himself, I jumped in with a post that started out:

It hardly seems necessary. A couple of quotes from the preface to the second edition should suffice:

Dennis added a reply saying:

Nowadays I can have other people do this for me, as later messages (Coffin, da Silva) did. (I suppose I better say :) just in case).

So, Dennis influenced me to quit using quotes from him to tell people they're full of garbage, as long as he was alive. Hopefully I can be forgiven for doing so now.