The software development firmament has lost one of its brightest lights. Dennis Ritchie, who created C and co-created Unix, has reportedly passed away after a long illness.

The self-effacing Ritchie was the recipient of the development world's most prestigious awards, including the ACM Turing Award, the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award, the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, a Bell Laboratories fellowship, the ACM Software System Award, the U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation, and the Japan Prize for Information and Communications. Ritchie was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 1988.

Ritchie's C language is still widely used. It has also served as the basis for C++, Java, C#, Objective-C, Perl, Python, and PHP. Unix is omnipresent, as is its open-source derivative, Linux. Ritchie's influence on our profession has been both deep and broad. He will be sorely missed.

Web recommendation: I am more comfortable writing paragraphs than class declarations, but even I hate writing documentation. Unfortunately, I've never had the luxury of turning over my apps to a tech-writing team...I've had to write the docs myself. It's a tedious and thankless task. Maybe that's why so much documentation is so lousy. Even if you aren't responsible for user docs, you should still document your work for the benefit of other developers who use it – and developers who will use it in the future. Get started with this thoughtful blog post from ProgrammableWeb.com: The Six Pillars of Complete Developer Documentation. Food for thought. J.D. say check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He recently relocated to a small town outside Belgrade – stop by if your travels take you through Serbia.