Strange Obit in The Economist

The Economist wrote an obit for Dennis Ritchie, who died October 12. The obit writer was so ignorant as to fail to mention that Dennis Ritchie is the Ritchie of Kernighan and Ritchie, "The C Programming Language", a slim paperback book owned and revered by every programmer on earth. The book is so basic and so well known that it goes by the name of "K&R" in the programming world.
Then the obit writer makes a few wild claims. "C fundamentally changed the way computer programs were written". Not quite so. That honor belongs to FORTRAN which goes back to the early 1950's. FORTRAN was the first widely accepted higher level language and made portable (will run on more than one brand of computer) programs possible. It was so popular that all competing computer companies were obliged to offer a FORTRAN compiler on their machines.
C came later, 1960's, from Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at Bell Labs. C caught on and became wildly popular because it was a vastly better FORTRAN than FORTRAN was. Not that C could do anything that FORTRAN couldn't do, but programming in C was infinitely easier. C swept away the myriad of pit falls, gotcha's and spaghetti coding practices of FORTRAN. I can still remember the pleasures of doing it in C after years of struggling along in FORTRAN.
C had a lot of great features, foremost among them was manual, K&R. This thin book was clear and lucid and above all short. Everything you need to know is in it, well organized and so well written you could read it for pleasure. Compared to the massive, wordy and opaque manuals that came with other computer languages, The C Programming Language was pure poetry and contributed mightily to the success of C.
Today practically all commercial programming is done in C. So in honoring Dennis Ritchie we are honoring a man who created modern computer programming, not single handedly, but with co workers. Dennis didn't do all the work, but he did do a lot of the work.