They're all important, but arguably Ritchie was more directly influential to modern computing from a practical perspective.
Fortran? Better designed? You're the first one I've seen who claims that. I'm assuming you're referring to the Fortran 90 standard and later, which cleaned up the language significantly and gave it a lowercase name. But the FORTRAN before that was simply ugly. I wouldn't call it Backus' starring moment. I'd say his research on functional programming and being a member of the ALGOL committee was much more important.
Fortran ended up becoming more suited to a completely different domain than C, anyway. Numerical and scientific computing versus embedded systems and low-level programming with high-level imperative mnemonics.
Haven't read A Guide to Fortran Programming, but K&R is still quite great, nonetheless. Although its habits are outdated by now in favor of ANSI C, it's still a handy reference.
It's ok as system programing language for the bits you dont code in assembly but for a General purpose language you have to do to much heavy lifting with C and its derivatives for my liking YMMV.
Fortran? Better designed? You're the first one I've seen who claims that. I'm assuming you're referring to the Fortran 90 standard and later, which cleaned up the language significantly and gave it a lowercase name. But the FORTRAN before that was simply ugly. I wouldn't call it Backus' starring moment. I'd say his research on functional programming and being a member of the ALGOL committee was much more important.
Fortran ended up becoming more suited to a completely different domain than C, anyway. Numerical and scientific computing versus embedded systems and low-level programming with high-level imperative mnemonics.
Haven't read A Guide to Fortran Programming, but K&R is still quite great, nonetheless. Although its habits are outdated by now in favor of ANSI C, it's still a handy reference.