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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."
They've also given awards to Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee... I think you've hit on a hidden motivation here, they're giving out awards to the most important people involved in enabling the streaming of porn to one's own home! I'll put money on Al Gore getting the next award, after all, he was instrumental in the creation of the internet!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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)
Multics was heavily influential in the development of Unix. The inventor(s) of Multics perhaps deserve as much credit.
Table-ized A.I.
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!
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.
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.
I know this, but it's still intrusive. I suppose you kill aqua and live in console most of the time on your Mac, right? That's what I thought. I've tried a lot of window managers; from fast light to evilwm to olvm to fvwm2 to mwm to enlightenment to whatever, and three big DEs and OS X is more intrusive than any of them. The interface/theme is so tightly woven to the user experience that, without it, OS X would be an also-ran. To push its Unix guts as if that was the central power feature is a bit of a red herring (or would it be a strawman?) Apple pushes its Unix to get the devs and UNIX wonks onboard. They're saying "Look, we're not like Windows. We can prove it, see, we ship with a real console that knows how to properly do history and we include vi out of the box." To EVERYONE else they're saying "You don't need to look behind the curtain, ever."
Don't get me wrong, I like Apple boxes, just not enough to buy and use them. The one thing I don't like about Apple is that I was too stupid to buy their stock when it was eleven bucks...