Came across a blog post noting how people with great influence on the world can receive greatly divergent levels of attention that is not proportionate to their effect on the world.
Dennis Ritchie v. Steve Jobs.
I suppose Ritchie just didn’t have the same “personality cult” as Jobs. That’s really the best explanation in my opinion. Jobs was a public person, making speeches all the time, whereas, Ritchie doubted how influential his invention would be.
I must provide a clarification to the content in the link above. Now, I’m sure no one actually believes the statements to be literally true, but it’s worth noting that of course things like Firefox, Google, Windows, and iPhones would exist in a world without C. It’s just that the implementation might have been different and the time frames might have been different. These things would simply have been done in a different language.