Dennis Ritchie Interviewed

An anonymous reader writes "Unix.se has published an interview with Dennis Ritchie (inventor of C, co-creator of Unix)." Not very technical, but Dennis shares his thoughts on GNU, kernel design, and more.

Comments

Re:Ritchie's Plan 9

[$$$$$exyGal]

Here's a Plan 9 Screenshot that includes the bunny ;-).

--naked

Re:Ritchie's Plan 9

[Binarybrain]

According to this the licensing terms of Plan 9 are unacceptable to the GNU Foundation.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/plan-nine.html

Take it as you will when you decide whether or not to support this project.

Re:Ritchie is a down to earth guy.

[jericho4.0]

You're probably not a C programmer, then, but even still, you should hunt down some of his essays. They make for fasinating reading.

Re:Ritchie's Plan 9

[usrerco]

If I'm not mistaken, Glenda is one of the characters from the cover of "Marbles In My Underpants", a collection of comics by Renee French.

She has some great stuff. Her comics and drawings used to run in R.Crumb's "Weirdo" back in the 80's, and she's since come out with many of her own comics, including "Grit Bath", to name one of to several.

I was just cruising through her site, and came across this really weird rabbit. There's other great stuff there.. check it out. Her stuff is definitely 'from outer space' ;)

I dig surreal black+white illustrations myself; have some of my own work posted here and here.

Case-by-case basis

[csnydermvpsoft]

He uses Excel and Word, however, which (I have to admit) are the best programs currently for those tasks. However, what if he was doing coding, or web page design? Then it would be different.

I used Win98SE for quite a while for development work, but got tired of running out of "resources" every couple of hours (non-NT-based Windows's have a limited stack in which to store "resources" such as icons and other images). This was because I had too many programs at once. A reboot every couple of hours, not to mention not being able to have too many programs open at once, are not great for productivity.

I then tried installing Win2k, but reverted back to 98 after it refused to boot for some unknown reason, and was not able to be recovered (I barely even managed to save the data on the HD - last time I ever will use NTFS, as no common tools work well with it).

Now, I'm running Gentoo Linux. While there definitely was a learning curve, my productivity is a lot higher than it ever was while using Windows. In addition to handling lots of apps open gracefully, the command line (which I've always preferred, even in Windows) is a lot more powerful. I can do this because all of the apps that I use (mainly coding and web design apps) have great Linux equivalents.

If I was doing desktop publishing or something, however, I probably wouldn't use Linux - it doesn't have equivalent applications to MS Office (though OpenOffice is getting close). I probably wouldn't use Windows, either - I'd use a mac, which has a better Office port than Windows (all of the good coders at MS work in the Mac division). If I was doing game developing, I would probably work under Windows, since that would be the primary target platform.

The point is, use whatever best fits the job - in this case, he uses a combination of Plan 9 and NT. I use Linux. Somebody else uses Mac.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution (as much as Microsoft would like to have you believe).

Re:Ritchie is a down to earth guy.

[Trekologer]

Yes he is. I had the fortune to attend a talk that he gave at Bell Labs a couple years ago and among other things, he gave a demonstration of Inferno. He is definately a brilliant computer scientist and very humble despite the legacy he will leave behind.

loads of things

[DrSkwid]

not easy to summarise

try reading the papers

user level file systems :
Instead of having one protocol for interrogating the disks, one for the network etc. plan9 uses the 9p protocol. In this way the physical devices are abstracted and one can use a single set of tools to inspect them. It taes the concept of Everything is a file to it's logical conclusion.
Want to know where the mouse is : cat /dev/mouse

Get slashdot homepage using the shell :

conn = `{cat /net/tcp/clone} # ( `{} is like bash's `` )

<[4] $conn { # keeps it open
echo 'connect slashdot.org!80' > /net/tcp/$conn/ctl
echo 'GET http://slashdot.org/ HTTP/1.0' > /net/tcp/$conn/data
cat /net/tcp/$conn/data
}

I wrote an irc bot as an exercise in rc. It dangerously executes given commands and returns the results

There are also other great technologies.
Incremental backups are built in.
Acme is an interactive editor that does all sorts of interesting things.

The plumber - forget file associations. The plumber uses regular expressions and executes whatever commands you would like it to for a set of given strings. So if you see http://slashdot.org in ANY piece of on-screen text, right click and select plumb and it will open it. [hehe not it plan9's web browser - that is one area seriously lacking.

The really sad part is that Lucent's financial troubles means that people have been shed from Bell-Labs. No-one is being paid to maintain plan9 any more. The heroes remaining and some outside [Rob Pike, Russ Cox, Dave Pressotto, C H Forsyth, et. al.] are doing it in their own time. And doing a great job.

I could go on but I need to leave the house. [that always seems to be the case when plan9 gets mentioned here!]

Re:What is it about his latest OS, Plan 9?

[taweili]

Plan 9 is supposed to correct what's wrong with the development Unix after Unix was "embrace and extended" by the Unix commercial vendors.

I used Plan 9 for about 9 months back in 1996. Here are some of the ideas behind it.

Everything in the system are files: This was a simple notion but powerful abstraction. Everything in the system is access through the file system API and all objects in the system have a representation in the file systems including low level network and graphics.

A per process private file name system: Plan 9 has the notion of a private file name space for each process. That means that I can create file system namespace on a individual process level.

A file system base network protocol call 9P All network services for Plan 9 are export as files to another machine.

A single sign on authentication system This has been featured a while ago. Check it out here

With these simple abstraction, you can do really cool things:

• Recursive windowing system: the framebuffer of the systme is mounted at /dev/graph (or similar name. It was a while ago). Since one can build private name space for each process, just open up a new windows, mount its graphic context at the /dev/graph and launch another copy of the windowing system in the process. The new windowing system will think the windows as the whole screen. Comes pretty handy hacking windowing system.
• Build firewall through remote file system. Say you have a machine that's on the edge with two ethernet cards and no routing enable between the two interfaces. Bascially a firewall. You can gain remote access by login into the machine, mount its /dev/eth0 to your current process's /dev/eth0 and launch browser in the process. Now, you are browsing using the firewall's external interface. This is done securely because of the private name space and single sign on. You are the only one open to the outside. The configuration of this firewall is "local" to you.

Build upon this and taking the Unix Small is Beautiful approach to problem solving. Plan 9 allows each program to perform small tasks well and provide the way to unified them together through private file name space.

Plan 9's design has a lot of impact on Linux, probably more then Linus would admit. /proc file system, process as thread, and others. These abstract can be traced back to Plan 9. Seeing those implementation on Linux (a traditional Unix clone), it become evidenced why original Unix folks like Dennis Richite wanted to start a new project to correct the mistakes of Unix. ;)

Plan 9 From Bell Labs is the Plan 9 manifesto. Good overview into the system and the rest of the documents.

Re:GNU's take on Licenses

[Russ Nelson]

If RMS deems a license non-compatible with the GPL, then it is by definition not "Free", and software licensed under that non-compatible license is not "Free Software".

Wrong.

I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure the Plan 9 license is officially recognized as an Open Source license.

Wrong.

Software companies are not going to go away overnight (or even in the forseeable future, if you value useable software), but in a world of "GPL, and nothing but GPL" those companies cannot exist.

One must ignore the existance of Red Hat, but you're already proven that you live a fact-free existance, so why not?
-russ

Re: Socialism

[PhilHibbs]

Socialism is sometimes used to mean "socially conscious", but the technical definition is "state ownership of the means of production" (as against communism, "workers' ownership of the means of production"). It's a politically loaded term and should be avoided, really.

The ideas of java were around for awhile

[Ayanami Rei]

People were writing simple simulators for machines that didn't exist anymore (or not at all) back in the 70s.

Java was a bigger, more amibitious effort; a language and core library effort coupled with a virtual machine.