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Dennis Ritchie Day
mikejuk writes "Today we celebrate Dennis Ritchie Day, an idea proposed by Tim O'Reilly. Ritchie, who died earlier this month, made contributions to computing that are so deeply woven into the fabric that they impact us all. We now have to remark on the elephant in the room. If Dennis Ritchie hadn't died just after Steve Jobs, there would probably have been no suggestion of a day to mark his achievements. We have to admit that it is largely a response to the perhaps over-reaction to Steve Jobs which highlighted the inequality in the public recognition of the people who really make their world work."
If we had days and events to recognize each and everyone who helped to make the world work, the world would not work.
Today we come to slashdot not to piss on the memory of appliance designer Steve Jobs but to celebrate a true computer scientist and engineer dmr.
He was not a boisterous man or one too proud and busy to assist various teenagers on the internet who now wish they'd archived those emails. He was able to admit his greatest works were flawed. And perhaps most importantly, the man could create excellent documentation.
To commemorate dmr is to commemorate ourselves as his ideas still hold sway. He lives on in the constantly modified code base. His DNA remaining as his direct additions are slowly dropped from the source while his patterns remain.
ALL HAIL ELDER GOD OF COMPUTING DMR, MAY HIS LANGUAGE AND OS LIVE ON UNTIL WE ADOPT SOMETHING BETTER
BCPL only had one data type. Everything in it was a word. It didn't have arrays or structures, just arithmetic on words (which could then be treated as pointer to other words). Try writing C with no data types other than uintptr_t, intptr_t and uintptr_t* - no arrays, no structs, no chars - and see how far you get.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
OK, a number of people contacted the Guardian before this, but however it happened they got the point and gave him a full page on the Saturday edition. I hope that goes some way to make up for Google having to help rescue Bletchley Park.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
This has just appeared: On Dennis Ritchie: A conversation with Brian Kernighan