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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.
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Back in the "good old days", operating systems weren't portable, so you were locked in from the start.
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the strongest word is still the word "free"
What would the world be without gnu? Shudder.
I am typing this on a windows2000 box now but I have apache, perl, devc++, cygwin, and tlc running. Would these utilities be free today if Gnu or Linux never was born? I don't think so.
We would just have Visual Studio for an expensive price. VC or VB take your pick.
Free Software is great and it opens up the market and provides a scene. Especially if you do not have two dimes to rub together.
http://saveie6.com/
I would have expected an interview with him about how great he is, how great his invention C is, etc. However, I was really amazed. He seems rather low key and does not seem to have that superiority complex that plagues some idividuals. He seems like a human being with an interest in computers. I like this. It is a welcome read after listening to my professors make fun of people with their heads on tripods, when they should look in the mirror cause they have the biggest heads on the most massive tripods ever seen.
I would have liked to see longer answers and in more detail to some of his questions. Although, I can say tersness can be a desired trait.
Reserved Word.
Ok, the guy is venerated by many and was behind Unix, the C language etc, but does he really have anything relevant to say about what is going on in the world today. Of course we will never know if the interviewers only ask a few questions and settle for short, vague answers. His comments left me with no new understanding of anything... from the interview it seems as though he hasn't really been doing anything at all. He said just enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth. In particular I disagree with his view of free software. Of course they had to reinvent the wheel on a lot of things to get Linux/freeBSD or any free software going. All the stuff that wasn't free was copyrighted. We are getting to the point now that there is a free foundation for sofware upon which developers can build more innovative things(not that there was a complete lack of innovation to begin with). In any event, Linux couldn't be en-vogue forever, but that doesn't mean it's not good. People shouldn't bash a good thing just because they're tired of hearing about it.
My Blog
They're tools, not toys.
You're wrong. They're both.
FWIW, I'm typing this from a Windows 2000 system. I agree: use what works best. But personally, I'm hoping free software can continue to improve to the point where I'd find it more productive to use in enough situations to warrant the "final" switch.
Until then, I will settle for what works best for me in more situations: Windows.
I am typing this on a windows2000 box now but I have apache, perl, devc++, cygwin, and tlc running. Would these utilities be free today if Gnu or Linux never was born? I don't think so.
Yes, and every other post (I exaggerate) is about how Richard Stallman smells.
I'm not sure the GPL is the best license possible, but hell, I've seen the free software ethic take off and provide me with more excellent programs than I'd ever be able to write myself -- or afford to purchase.
PS: I should note that Bell Labs provided the C and C++ programming languages free of charge too. Do you use them? how many of your programs -- how much of your OS -- is built on C or C++?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Right. Taking the path of least resistance, with no regard for ideology or ethics is the perfect thing to do. I use free software both because it meet my needs and as my personal "fuck off" to the Microsofts and Apples (yeah, you heard me you marketing-whores) of the world. I can understand people using Microsoft because they have to (because they have some business that requires it, for instance.) But using it just out of sheer desire to propogate the status quo? That's just lazy. It's fine to adhere to one ideology or the other. Not adhering to any ideology at all is just a bee-line to decadence. You sir represent everything that is wrong with this world.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I will, for this post, ignore the blatant pandering to the unwashed masses of Slashdot readership.
That being said, how dare you misrepresent Mr. Ritchie? He didn't say he felt that it was too political. He said that it was more extreme than he cared for. "I believe we should kill all the whales" is obviously more extreme than "we should only kill some of them", but they're equally political. They're also equally economic in nature.
And as somebody else has already pointed out, he was co-developing C when there was nothing *BUT* vendor lock-in.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
While I agree the Plan 9 license isn't the best in the world, some of us aren't all that excited about software under the GPL or even LGPL. Stallman urges developers away from the Apache license let alone the Plan 9 license.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
" I was not aware that the primary objective of Slashdot was to blindly bash Microsoft"
Everyone hates The Man. And if you are 'nerd' in in IT, Microsoft is the Man.
I would imagine that most of the casual bashers are just plain normal MS powerusers who are pissed that their Win98 machine hung right in the middle of downloading MP3s or playing counterstrike or that they have to do tech support all the time.
So they buzz over to slashdot and vent steam that MSN is sending an Opera 6 stylesheet to one-week-old Opera 7, or whatever the bashfest of the day is.
If it wasn't entertaining, nobody would read this site.
I use free software both because it meet my needs and as my personal "fuck off" to the Microsofts and Apples of the world.
Reality Check:
Some programmers (like me) have spent years working on products like Mac OS X so that you can use a computer as a tool. See, we believe that the machine should help you get something done, and get the heck out of the way otherwise.
For some people, that means having txtfiles config everything, because their brains are capable of modeling the operation of the whole machine in their head.
For others (like me) I'd rather see the computer go off and do the stuff I can't, and simplify the user interaction so that the user can keep their problem in their head.
What the original poster was saying is that too many geeks forget that "how the computer works" is the problem they use computers to solve, and most other users have totally different problems, and wish us geeks would stop imposing our problemset on them.
So if you want to tell MS and Apple to fuck off, don't do it because they serve an "ideology" different from yours. GUI/CLI design is not a zero-sum game.
I guess you'd think that the boycott of Nestle baby milk, or not buying cosmetics products tested on animals, or not buying CDs because there the RIAA do things you don't like - I guess you'd think all those things are stupid yes?
Because really people will make political statements about things all the time. Most stuff is political, even if you don't realise it. Politics is just one facet of the interactions of humans. So, if people wish to take the piss out of Microsoft because they've done bad things, let them.
use a desktop computer and desktop software that actually works - to be productive instead of to feel technically and morally "superior" (whatever that means).
I'm under the distinct impression that believing you are the paragon of rationality who would never even conceive of using anything but the best tool for the job (in your opinion) actually makes you feel morally and technically superior.
Just because some people consider more than one factor when choosing a product, doesn't mean they're wrong, it just means they have different priorities to you.
Yes, of course, but not as many as you might think. Lots of people seem to miss this point, even Ritchie - when Stallman set out on the GNU project, his aim was not to build a gee-whiz cutting edge computer system, it was to produce free software that would be very useful to people. At the time, everybody used UNIX, so that's what it made sense to "make free". Also, there was a lot of experience with UNIX systems, and communications wasn't as good back then as it is now, so the modularity of UNIX meant the work could easily be split into various teams.
Even though the driving force was a desire for software freedom rather than cool features, Linux and the rest of the GNU system today have all kinds of stuff that wasn't in the old UNIX systems. In fact, stuff like /proc was stolen directly from Plan9.
Note that some of the ideas that might sound good at first, have been tried, and basically don't work, or don't work as well as you might expect. The microkernel for instance. The Hurd is of course a microkernel based system, yet we all use Linux. Why? Because it was there, and it was pretty good. And now highly modular monolithic kernels have many of the advantages of microkernels, and microkernels have steadily increased in size as performance issues weighed in.
Ditto for a lot of other ideas that seemed good at the time, but actually perhaps weren't. AppFolders for instance (my pet one) :)
I think open-source and free (as in beer) software are great. The innovations of UNIX (which was quasi-open in the early days), BSD, X, et al. have provided a lot to everyone, including those of us who primarily use other systems (e.g. Windows, Mac OS or Linux).
I don't like GNU for two reasons. The first is that it's almost entirely derivative, copying the work of others (e.g. UNIX, BSD and Windows) and then seeking to replace the original works for political reasons. The second is that it seeks to eliminate all non-free software, which would be bad for professional programmers (like me) who have to work for a living instead of living off of grants like RMS (who really does seem to live in a fantasy world of his own).
The free/proprietary ecosystem actually works pretty well. BSD sockets, for example, made the Internet what it is, and if it hadn't been readily available to be ported for free to all the commercial OSes, it isn't as if everyone would have started using BSD instead. As much as that would have pleased me at the time, it simply wouldn't have happened. A restrictive licence like the GPL would have simply regressed progress and probably allowed some horrid extensions to IPX or NetBEUI to remain dominant. Not only would that have left non-BSD users worse off, it would have made integrating with the Novell/Microsoft-dominated network standards much more difficult for OSes like UNIX and Linux (which, in a BSD-sockets world, had a leg up on Microsoft and Novell because of BSD's UNIX origins).
Truly free software of the BSD, X and Apache sort it isn't all take either. If you look at the backers of the academic research that produced these things, a lot of funding came from firms that produce(d) proprietary software and later used the results of that research (in addition to the state, of course). BSD also spawned Sun Microsystems (among others), which would probably not have succeeded if it had been forced to share all its extensions to BSD and UNIX with, say, IBM and DEC.
In short, I like the ecosystem that allows people like me to use and contribute to hobbyist open-source (especially non-GPL) sofware while also getting paid to write commercial software during the day. Removing either, as the FSF/GNU would like to, or erecting a Chinese Wall between the two (as the GPL does) is, in my view, bad for all concerned. In other words, I completely agree with Ritchie that it's too extreme. I also believe its approach is simply wrong-headed and, if successful, will regress development of new software and new ideas in the long run.
Its a combination of "NIH" and envy. Linux has swiped ideas from all over the place. It was developed by many people all over the world instead of a small, select team. Its actually gone head to head with the big name, big money operating systems and come out on top. Its used their ideas but done far better than their work ever did. Its done everything wrong (smart programs, graphical desktop, open development) and still WON.
That, of course, is unforgivable.
Look at Ken's comments. "Not successful in the long run". Okay, so what will replace it? "Pieces that are good and pieces that are not". What project is this NOT true of? "In a non-PC environment, it just won't hold up". Yes, which is why Linux has been ported to everything under the sun (and some Suns, too) and stability on those systems is almost a higher priority than stability on x86.
You were great in the '70s, Ken, but you've become obsolete.
One of the inventors of Unix is wondering why the GNU (and by extension Linux) community is rebuilding something he made 30 years ago. I've been wondering the same thing myself. Aren't there any better ideas in the past 3 decades?
Thirty years ago, they didn't have vi or emacs. Thirty years ago, they didn't have WYSIWYG wordprocessors. Thirty years ago, they didn't have C++ or Perl or Python. Thirty years ago, they used ASCII, and maybe a few hacks that replaced ASCII punctuation with accented characters.
Rebuilding what he made 30 years, on a modern system, could be done by a dozen undergrads in a semester. You aren't running a system they had 30 years. You're running a massively evolved version of that system that continues to evolve.
I think a lot of young people who write open source are aiming for a public domain or BSD license,
Honestly, when I think of a license, it tends to be "Give me credit, money, and sexy women." And then I go "Okay, nobody's going to like that license; how about I go with the GPL, which prevents people from blatently ripping me off." I think a lot of young programmers want to use a harsh nasty license, but settle on the GPL as it's acceptable and cool in the open source world.
The point is not duplicating simple things that would save everyone time.
But you make us duplicate your simple things.
Software could have gotten a lot further a lot faster if there had been an "reference" UNIX spec
If you want to make a reference spec, form a consortium and make it. Somehow, I don't feel like making a reference spec so you can take it, improve it and sell it back to me. I want to build the best system on the market, not the least common denomenator that everyone rips off. "Cool, you built an Unix kernel. But if you want to run it on a Sun, you have to buy our Unix system, which is a rip off of yours." Not my game.
The person who invented Unix is doing what the rest of the world does - use a desktop computer and desktop software that actually works
I'm glad Dennis Ritchie validated your view of the world for you.
He uses Windows as an X-terminal and for web browsing and Office. Big deal - personally I think he is nuts since my favourite web browser, Galeon runs on Linux, and Linux makes a much better X client than Exceed running on NT. I use OpenOffice, and on the rare occasion I need to use MS Office I can fire it up in vmware.
That is what makes a productive and useful tool for me. But hey, I'm not Dennis Ritchie, so what do I know?
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
You, sir, have not even the faintest idea what you are talking about. There will always be a place for programmers, as 99% of software development is not done developing proprietary commercial software. People and companies will always need software, so there will always be people paying to have software developed, it doesn't matter how it's licensed, it's needed and will be paid for, or volunteer groups will develop it and/or businesses will help fund development. Just look at Mozilla, Linux, GNU, BSD(even more difficult as not all improvements make it back in), Open Office, Gnome, KDE, Konqueror fer Chrissake!, Gimp, Vim, Emacs, Wine(an open source reimplementation of windows!), MPlayer, Xine. Just browse around Freshmeat and SourceForge. There are some huge projects there, among all the little ones, done by volunteers. Then when businesses help out, even more gets done. IBM, HP, RedHat, etc. are all putting money into furthering Linux development, because it helps them. It might not make as much money over the short term as proprietary software, but proprietary software is a bad business.
Proprietary software is a bad business because you can't expect people to buy the same products over and over, forever. Physical products are a different matter, as they wear out, get damaged, etc. Think about it for a second. Businesses, schools, governments, all spend billions of dollars on the same software over and over again. Why should they do that? Some organizations that buy proprietary software spend so much(hundreds of millions of dollars per year) on software licensing, that they could fund development of their own software to replace said proprietary software. Depending on what they need, how much they spend, etc., after one year they could have already saved money. Being more conservative, a lot of organizations could look at things over the long term, and be saving money within 5 or 10 years by developing their own software, or helping develop existing free software.
Seriously, you're stupid if you don't see that. The only reason to stick with spending hundreds of millions on software is simply that that is the status quo. Governments and companies are starting to realize that. That's why so many European governments and companies, even the U.S. government and companies, are starting to get involved with "free software". They plan to save money, and have better software.
The things you are saying are unworkable, are already being put into practice.
How long has it taken to get HURD to a semi-useable state again?
Ok, now that's just absolute stupidity. Linux was developed, licensed under the GPL no less so there goes your implication that an OS kernel is too difficult a task to be completed by groups of volunteers, and HURD development was no longer necessary.
Not only are you flat out wrong, you are bordering on being, as another poster said, libelous, with your possibly intentional disinformation regarding software licensing.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
On the contrary, the GPL is explicitly non-exclusionary. Literally anybody can be in "our gang," even Microsoft (which does in fact sell GPL'ed software). It's counter-culture only because for the last twenty plus years the culture has been centered around the phrase, "What's mine stays mine." It used to be the other way around; see Bill Gates' letter to the hobbyists who were freely distributing his version of BASIC. At that time, Gates and co. were the counter-culturists.
Or when IBM and HP learn that they too can make billions on FOSS? "Big Business" is learning that it can be in their best interest to support FOSS developers; see, for instance, IBM's support for the Linux kernel development.
Probably because while they may admire the technology, they're turned off by the ideology.
This is is the paradox of freedom: maintenance of freedom requires the limitation of freedom. For example maintaining your right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness necessarily requires a limitation of my right to kill, imprison and otherwise abuse you -- even if your death would make me ever so happy.
Similarly, maintainence of your right to the freedom to use GPL software requires a limitation of my right to 'imprison' that same software.
You choose your poison, you pay your price.
Unabridged libertarianism is little more than the thinly disguised right of the strong to enslave the weak.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Sigh. I don't know if this is cute or sad.
' "Pieces that are good and pieces that are not." What project is this NOT true of?'
Um...Unix? Unix V.6? Have you read the source for it? It's brilliant! It's occasionally scary and convoluted, but it's GOOD CODE! Linux is an unholy mishmash of some good code, and some deeply sucky code that barely works at all. Sendmail is good code. BIND is good code.
Linux taken seriously on the non-X86 platform is being left to the manufacturers. The various ports of Linux to Sparc processors, for instance, most definitely do NOT hold up! SunLinux will hold up, because it's being developed by Sun for Sun.
Why is it that whenever anyone points out some of the valid and legitimate problems with (a)Linux, or (worse!!!) (b) Open Source development as a philosophy they're categorised as either Microsoft apologists or obsolete? (depending on their respect in the *ix world)
Here's a trick. Go back and reread the article. Think about WHY Ken would say what he did. Think about WHY Dennis Ritchie is fairly unimpressed with Linux. Think about WHY Bill Joy is frightened by the future of computing. Quit dismissing them as 'old farts from before I was born' and you might learn something. God forbid, you might even become a better developer/admin/geek.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
It must be nice to not need a resume.
-pyrrho