subrecursive hierarchies of functions*

The world lost another tech giant. Dennis Ritchie was the inventor of the C programming language and a co-creator of the UNIX operating system. He died this week at the age of 70. Originally from New York, he earned degrees from Harvard in both physics and applied mathematics, and spent his career with the famous Bell Labs in New Jersey. Those software creations--C and UNIX--are the foundations of most of today's systems. Macintosh computers, for example, run a Unix-based OS. Programmers learn things like C++ and Java these days, which are the progeny of C. Most of the servers that hold this whole intertubes thingie together run UNIX or a variant. Mr. Ritchie didn't do stuff that tech consumers notice. Instead he did the real brick-and-mortar work of the Information Age. Those of us lucky to be living in the wired world are standing on foundations laid down by this guy and his contemporaries. Recquiescat in pacem.



*the subject of Ritchie's thesis
I don't know what it means, either.