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Inventors of Unix Win Japan Prize
jbrodkin writes "The inventors of Unix and the C programming language, one of whom also created the first master-level chess-playing machine, have been awarded the prestigious Japan Prize for their work in building the Unix operating system in 1969. Ken Thompson, who is now a distinguished engineer at Google, and Dennis Ritchie, who is retired, were researchers at Bell Labs four decades ago when they 'developed the Unix operating system which has significantly advanced computer software, hardware and networks over the past four decades, and facilitated the realization of the Internet,' the Japan Prize Foundation said Tuesday in awarding them the 2011 prize. The pair join previous winners such as Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee. In addition to developing Unix, Thompson also played a key role in building Belle, the first chess-playing computer to achieve a master-level rating and five-time winner of the now-defunct North American Computer Chess Championship in the 1970s and 1980s. Ritchie and Thompson have also been credited with developing the C programming language, a process that occurred in conjunction with the development of Unix."
and congrats... 40 years later their influence is still amazing.
C|N>K
...you can download all the Japanese anime tentacle pr0n you ever wanted!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Google sure has an impressive amount of cool people working there...
Ken actually used his nifty hack of the C compiler and the login program to break into the computer that stored the committee's votes and flipped his and Steve Ballmer's vote.
I am officially gone from
I'm surprised to see that some Programming Language flame-war has started yet.
Oh wait, it's still early.
The Phelps clan found slashdot? There goes the neighborhood.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Thompson and Ritchie invented Unix and C because they needed a decent programming environment for the PDP-7 to develop their game "Space Wars". To my knowledge, the Bell Labs Space Wars title still hasn't shipped, thus inaugurating the tradition of galactic video game vaporware that continues to this day.
Here is the actual Al Gore quote:
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
Clumsy and self serving wording, yes. Claims to have invented the Internet? No, not at all. He was just saying that his policies helped create the Internet as we know it today, which is somewhat true. What he REALLY did was cosponsor the Information Infrastructure and Technology Act of 1992 which opened the Internet to commercial traffic.
So, we can really thank Gore for pop-up ads and spam, not the whole Internet.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
After struggling for years with a dozen programming languages I instantly fell in love with C because I could write tight code which compiled tiny and executed swiftly. Libraries were friendly (compared to Fortran, PL/1, Cobol, etc.) and who could not love linked lists? I liked it so much I bought too copies of The C Programming Language by Dennis Ritchie & Brian Kernighan - one copy for work and one for home.
It's sad to see the crap I have to code in now. =(
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Let's not forget this: Google won't allow the co-inventor of Unix and the C language to check-in code, because he won't take the mandatory language test. Quote: Legendary programmer Ken Thompson, for example, was required to prove his mettle at a programming language he himself co-invented before Google would deploy his programs. He never bothered, at least not by the time the book Coders at Work was published.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
Article would have been way more awesome without the word "Prize"
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
I work with computers all day. It's my job. I'm not a geek, yet it surprises me how comfortable it is to work in Unix. I like it better than any Windows version I've ever dealt with and better even than OS X. (Although the latter is the prettiest, I find it intrusive and too click-needy. Windows has always to me felt clumsy and Johnny-come-lately-ish.)
Bjarne Stroustrup, that is. After all, C++ has those ++ over C...
Multics was heavily influential in the development of Unix. The inventor(s) of Multics perhaps deserve as much credit.
Table-ized A.I.
PHP? Condoleances.
One of the greatest things of UNIX was that it was designed to be machine-neutral as much as possible. That meant you would have this common framework that would be available anywhere and everywhere.
The C programming language was designed with the same platform-abstracting ideas in mind. Unfortunately later C libraries (past those of ANSI/ISO C) started becoming more and more platform specific (mostly as a result of vendors either doing it "their way" or deliberately tying people to their platform). Later on, Java would grow for the same reason again, but with far more extensive standardized libraries covering what people wanted to do in the Internet Age (sockets, HTTP, multi-threading, platform-independent GUI [Swing with Nimbus looks great and performs well ever since rendering was fully hardware accelerated in 1.6.0_u10]).
Unfortunately we're at the stage where vendors are seeking to close things out again. Apple makes wonderful hardware but their walled garden approach is counterproductive from a global industry perspective (and why they will arguably 'fail' to set the standards for software a second time around, for the same reasons, but will make a colossal amount of money anyway). Google's Android is better, but is still a little bit of a walled garden. Hopefully innovation in profit will move elsewhere ('standardization' of one sort or another eventually comes to almost all technologies) and allow things to settle down in the phone space - and allow the cross-platform ideals of UNIX to once again return. One day I hope that phones are sufficiently powerful (processing and energy/battery life) that developing for them is as simple as for the embedded, desktop and server spaces (which have specialized libraries but are essentially the same these days [if you are using Java]).
The highest accolade for C came from my Computer Music professor, Paul Lansky: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lansky . He did stuff with FORTRAN, which he described as a "clunky" language, and then started moving to C. I can't remember the precise words that he used, but he seemed to get across that programming in C was like composing music for him.
A music professor? Programming in C? Yep, that happens.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Old hacker mentality: you just don't comply with a restriction, you invent a new clever way to get around it ("go" in this case? As it was the PDP/UNIX?).
Compliance is definitely not aligned with invention; not saying that non-compliance is sufficient for invention, but seems to me as being necessary.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I still don't really understand the problem here. He goes on to say (even in the quote in Coders At Work I think) that it's not some principled refusal to (why would you do that?), and it's not like stuff's being held up because he can't check in code. It's just that he's "found no need to". His ban on checking code in was just a technicality.
Besides, he's since gone on to work on Go for them, so I'm guessing he did feel a need to be able to check code in, and probably just took the test.
If Ritchie had had any clue about how universal his "hello, world" program would become in the world of programming, maybe he and his book's co-author would've spent an extra afternoon kicking around the possibilities:
#include "stdio.h"
int main()
{
printf( "I'm here on the inside, and you're not.\n" );
return 0;
}
The next Japan prize should go to Bill Joy for his invention of the world's best text editor.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
He writes symphonies in C, why not write code in it too?
Congratulations to these two! It is richly deserved.
Unix succeeded so well because it encourages failure. The C language is Spartan and direct. There are no safety nets. People who can't keep their pointers straight soon find themselves working in a different profession, such as programming in Java. This is the same dynamic described by Adam Smith for the free market.
I also enjoy pointing out the joy of linked lists..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
4. It has the worlds's worst - and I do mean worst - text editor - VI. VI requires 3 or 4 keystrokes that better editors can do in 1 or 2. Yes I know you can use others. .
As far as I know, 1 or 2 keystrokes with broken finger joints are way slower than 3 or 4 normal keystrokes.
Not that these two don't deserve it, but I sometimes wonder if accepting awards is like a full-time job for them.
(Currently taking a break from writing C code. In Unix.)
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
I like to take it to the next level with trees. But I still enjoy your pointing and grand parent's love of linked lists. :P
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
"Prove his mettle" is not exactly correct. I took the Google C++ coding test. It's not to test that you can code well; it's just to test that you are aware of Google's internal style guidelines (things like indentation, variable naming conventions, and the like). It's a good way to emphasize the importance of stylistically consistent code.
Incidentally, I love this approach because I HATE having to go through messy code. Ugh. For some bizarre reason, master's students with several years of industry experience just cannot figure out how to correctly indent code.
"Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie win Japan Prize."
Skip useless introductions.
What languages do you find yourself programming in now? C++, C#, or ?
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
You know that the old Slashdot is dead and nerds, who matter, are long gone when Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie need such a long introduction in the summary... this place smells rotten..
But after modul
With this belated public recognition of UNIX, I predict that, finally, 2011 will be the year of UNIX on the desktop.
The Japan prize is actually ONE HUNDRED DARA!!! You win ONE HUNDRED DARA for invent Unix operating system!!! You big winna!!! *insert loud obnoxious noises and strange mascot here* *insert crazy cheering audience here*
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Anyone here actually using Go? It seems like a sweet little language, basically an update of C that is true to the original spirit of the language (small, close to the hardware). When C was created, garbage collection wasn't a mature technology; now it is, so it makes sense to have it built in. However, Go seems pretty raw, and there are other carefully designed C-like languages (D, objective C) that have a huge head start. It's also a drag that Go's binary interface isn't compatible with C's, and I'm not aware of any significant real-world projects using Go.
Find free books.
> The main reason i see for it is in comparison to most other OSs,
> everything* can be accessed as a file. This includes most devices
> and sockets. That has made unix very agile and has allowed it to
> adapt with the times. The only OS i can think of that goes further
> than unix in this respect is plan 9, which was also designed by
> bell labs as the successor to unix. Plan 9 goes as far as allowing
> peripherals on the network to be accessed as files.
There is a reason NFS actually stands for Not really a File System.
NFS breaks "everything is a file".
DFS (Distributed File System) from Tektronix allows accessing devices
on remote nodes. And unlike NFS, DFS actually works.
WHY WHY WHY did NFS become the defacto standard? :-(
We need a FLOSS implementation of DFS.
Read the headline: Inventors of Unix Win... what the heck is Unix Win? Is that anything like Lindows?
That seems a dangerous road, I'm sure he writes symphonies in C# as well...