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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."
Just wait till Kenan Thompson gets a job there. That will make it cooler than Good Burger
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.
COBOL I tell you! It can do anything even grate cheese to a fine shredding! It will also clean your toilet! No other programming languages can do that. HA!
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)
His current work has mostly been on a new programming language called Go (for those who have not heard of it). A young, but thus far impressive systems programming language.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
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.
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;
}
OSX is unix with an aqua graphical user interface/theme.
He writes symphonies in C, why not write code in it too?
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 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...
"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.