printf("Adieu Ritchie, McCarthy and Jobs");

In the last two weeks, the world of computing has lost three of its stalwarts - Dennis Ritchie (the inventor of C and Unix), John McCarthy (the father of AI and Lisp) and Steve Jobs (of Apple). 

For me and for basically everybody I know of, the introduction to programming came through C. I still admire C for its simplicity and orthogonality. The notions of elegant and efficient programming can probably not be taught better in any language other than C. Unix, of course, is a boon to the world - an operating system so simple and elegant that every OS of note essentials follows its design principles. Ritchie, Brian Kerninghan and Ken Thompson were first class hackers who changed the world  forever. 

The very term 'Artificial Intelligence' was coined by John McCarthy and he along with Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon laid the foundations of this branch of computer science that I now happen to be associated with. AI is now the darling of the computing world, though the challenges McCarthy had set for us is still far away. And who can forget Lisp - the language that has spawned the functional paradigm of programming that every programmer of note will appreciate for its elegant style.     

Unlike Ritchie and McCarthy, Jobs was no technical whiz or geek - but the idea that drove him was the same - beauty and elegance. Its a word not normally associated with CEO - but it is his insistence of aesthetics that has seen Apple build the sleekest products that just do what they are supposed to do with no feature crap that is the bane of all software. 

R.I.P