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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.
i was thinking maybe a fund to help educate people would be a more fitting memorial ?
how about a free e/book ?
regards
John Jones
More people celebrate "Talk like a Pirate Day" than "Dennis Ritchie Day."
People like good salesmen not people that work in unknown office spaces, regardless of their contributions.
A public image is the luxury of those who don't have to labour, and so can afford to put their efforts into selling their ideas and themselves.
Dennis Ritchie was a giant within his tribe, RIP.
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
free() at last!
free() at last!
Error: Double free or corruption.
Aborted!
Am I missing something here that says we have to compare all these people on the merits of their accomplishments?
Steve Jobs did great things. Dennis Ritchie did great things as well. We can argue all day about who was "better" or "more influential", but what's the point? Why not just celebrate their lives to honor them, instead of to passive-aggressively piss off people who look up to someone else?
If you celebrate Dennis Ritchie, do it for his monumental contributions to computing. If you do it just because you think Steve Jobs got too much attention, you're doing a disservice to both of their memories.
It is a nice idea, I suppose... But why Oct 30? Is it just because his birthday (which is in September) is too far away, and we'll forget him by then?
When is John McCarthy day?
"...the inequality in the public recognition of the people who really make their world work."
You're joking, right?
When a surgeon saves the life of a loved one, no one EVER walks right past the doctor to make a phone call to thank the inventor of plastic, blended steels, or surgical procedures. I don't even have to wonder how many surgically-enhanced women walking around these days have EVER thought to thank the inventor of silicone, because the answer is likely zero.
And the same thing should be expected in damn near any other industry. Most of us probably owe our lives to some scientist or inventor, yet you've probably not even bothered to know who it is, much less give them any recognition, living or dead.
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
How can it be a bad thing for Steve Jobs' death to have brought increased awareness of Dennis Ritchie's contributions? Assuming, that is, that there's ANY connection between the two. It doesn't have to be a competition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Hilleman The guy develops loads of vaccines include 8 of the 14 currently recommended. Some how they forgot to give the guy the Nobel prize in medicine. Seems like it's long overdue. (I mean he's got a couple of buildings with his name on them but nothing that would tell anybody that he probably saved the lives of tens to hundreds of millions of people.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
...and there's nothing wrong with that. The point to me wasn't so much about 'who was better or more influential', it was clearly about the fact that mass media was utterly swamped, to the point of nausea on my part anyway, with Jobs 'retrospectives' and commentaries. Celebrating that this other man who so recently passed was in many ways more influential on the 'guts' of IT, ostensibly what the readers on slashdot would care more about, is neither disrespectful to Jobs or out of place in any way.
I wish this had been more publicized. I just found out about this by reading this article. I would have preferred that there was more of a chance to do events locally today. A gathering in a pub, or a Linux fest celebrating his accomplishments.
As for the S.J. vs. D.M.R.:
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Richard Stallman, Tim Berners Lee, Linus ..., and millions of others owe their lives to the work done
Torvolds,
by Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, with the assistance of Brian
Kernighan. The IT World would be MUCH different, and definitely not as
technologically advanced as it is today, without their efforts.
They deserve much more recognition, awards and thanks from the entire
world than they will ever receive.
Rest in Peace Dennis! You and your work will never be forgotten! Thank you!
Even if you don't use lisp, it has affected programming. I see a lot of later languages as starting with a 'C' foundation moving towards lisp. Java would be a major example, python too.
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."
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.
Okay. Its not hard, its tedious, but you're basically describing what happens when I work in assembly. To the computer, its all just numbers. The structures of C are artificial constructs to make it easier on the developer. They are reduced to pure numbers for the computer itself to work with. I would be much slower working that way, but only until I could write a BCPL program to preprocess my source files to turn my structure definitions into BCPL code.
Don't get me wrong, C did change the world (something else probably would have done it if it wasn't C), Dennis Richie deserves our remembrance for his contribution.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
But K&R actually built something almost from the ground up using rather primitive tools, and today the children and bastard children of their ideas are running six machines in my house. (Possibly 7 if, as I suspect, the solar panel inverter supervisor is BSD based).
I entirely agree about Einstein, though. Physics is much more of a collaborative effort than the media like to pretend. The fact is that we could have developed all modern technology without the Theory of Relativity, using empirical rules. Quantum mechanics, however, is actually necessary for the furtherance of chemistry and modern materials (including things like IC substrates). But there is really no one father of quantum mechanics.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Yes, but ultimately, they did implement it and it's still going strong 40+ years later. That says something, and it's not like Apple which manages to maintain a small section of the market with limited competition. C isn't as widely used as it used to be, but it's managed to do quite well considering the huge number of languages that have popped up in the mean time, many of which were gunning for it.
This has just appeared: On Dennis Ritchie: A conversation with Brian Kernighan
"When is John McCarthy day?"
Most people aren't sure if he's the caricature with the hand up his butt from the 1950s or the congressman from the 1950s.
Oh wait. I repeat myself.
Seriously, though a number of the pioneers of computing are leaving us or soon will be.
In this case though the point is do you think that anyone would have suggested a dmr day without the same having been done for Steve Jobs. It''s not about stealing anyones thunder.
He's just refactoring.
And speaking of phones, the software that runs the phone network is largely written in C.
Well, in the US.
Ericson stuff will be written in Erlang.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Completely and utterly off-topic, had the Germans not had Hitler, for instance, the German military might have found another front man to run the country. At some point they would probably have started a war of expansion to reclaim their losses of WW1. That might have been a "normal" war run by sane people. The outcome might have been very different for German Jews, but not much different for the French or the Poles. The world today might look rather similar, but with the EU much more obviously a German economic state.
However, but for Unix, computer systems might have stayed fragmented and proprietary. It's very hard to predict the outcome - personal computers might have stayed very limited systems, the Internet might never have started its enormous spread. The world banking system might have become far less computer-centric. It is entirely possible that K&R were simply extremely lucky, or simply very bright, and whether the results of their work were overall a good or a bad thing is, in my view, far too early to call.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Okay. Its not hard, its tedious, but you're basically describing what happens when I work in assembly.
I take it that you have not written programs in BCPL then. C is nicer in that the different data types (char, short, int, ...) compile down to different machine level instructions. Handling characters (ie single bytes) in BCPL is not nice, floats - were single precision (assuming 32 bit words). So not the same as what you do in assembler.
I do miss a few things from BCPL like VALOF/RESULTIS almost anywhere, it also used ':=' for assignment - I wonder how many many years of debugging time would have been saved if C had used that rather than a simple '=' ?
2day should be another SEVE JOBS day instead cuz he gave us all da ipodz!!!
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
You had me up until "Why?". Alas, computer scientists will never get their full dues.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I'm a research scientist and software engineer with a PhD, and I can clearly see that these accomplishments are amazing.
Additionally, I have made my living using Unix and programming languages derived from C, and for that, Dennis Ritchie deserves substantial acclaim.
Was the world better off due to C? If it had not existed then programmers may have simply used Pascal. The world would largely be the same, except we would have far fewer buffer overflows. ;-)
Jobs and Woz wouldn't be where they are without each other, nor would they be where they are without Ritchie (and a whole slew of other pioneers).
The Apple II's OS was written in assembly. The original 3rd party development environments were assembly and BASIC. The Macintosh's OS was written in Pascal. The original 3rd party development environment was Pascal. C and Unix were not really involved in Apple's *initial* success.
C and UNIX were not comparable to anything that was being done anywhere else in the world at the time.
I fail to see how C was terribly different from Pascal, ALGOL and a host of other languages available back in the day. I've used C for decades, but if one of the other languages had become dominant I expect the world would be largely the same. A lot of early 3rd party Mac programming was done in Pascal, Mac OS itself was written in Pascal. A lot of early 3rd party and hobbyist PC programming was done in Pascal. I think Borland's Delphi demonstrates a more modern Pascal dialect that works well for large scale modern applications.
Perhaps a correction is in order, if C had not existed the world would largely be the same, except perhaps we would have far few buffer overflow concerns.
If you want to talk about languages that were truly different then you need to discuss LISP, APL, etc.
One day something set me off, and I was wondering how the name "cron" was chosen. Wikipedia credited Brian Kernighan with creating cron, so I took a chance and emailed him. He responded and said he thought it was derived from chronos.. but that he didn't write it and didn't know why Wikipedia credited him. He said it was probably Ken (Thompson), Dennis, or Bob Morris.
So I emailed Ken and Dennis at what email addresses I could find for them, I couldn't find Bob's email.
Dennis emailed me back and said that Steve Johnson was the author of the Unix cron, and that he thought the name had to do with chronology. Ken emailed me back and said he thought he wrote it, and that the name had to do with time.
I was really surprised these guys emailed me back about something so trivial, but I was still pretty excited about getting responses. The answers weren't completely definitive, but interesting none the less. Something that we use every day, and nobody seems to be quite sure who wrote it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
And which programs are those that you have made? Microsoft Windows? UNIX? Photoshop? Has anyone actually heard about your programs?
A couple are in the links above in fact, & they're still out there (even though I haven't been active in 7++ yrs. in the freeware/shareware world since then, circa 1995-2003), as to this from you:
"And which programs are those that you have made?" - by hakahaka (2485890) on Sunday October 30, @05:46PM (#37888284)
NOW, as to THIS from you:
"Has anyone actually heard about your programs?" - by hakahaka (2485890) on Sunday October 30, @05:46PM (#37888284)
Many people have & did, especially since they did well in respected enough written publications in the arena of computer sciences liking them enough to review them well, ala:
"My Name is Ozymandias: King of Kings - Look upon my works, ye mighty, & DESPAIR..."
----
Windows NT Magazine (now Windows IT Pro) April 1997 "BACK OFFICE PERFORMANCE" issue, page 61
(&, for work done for EEC Systems/SuperSpeed.com on PAID CONTRACT (writing portions of their SuperCache program increasing its performance by up to 40% via my work) albeit, for their SuperDisk & HOW TO APPLY IT, took them to a finalist position @ MS Tech Ed, two years in a row 2000-2002, in its HARDEST CATEGORY: SQLServer Performance Enhancement).
WINDOWS MAGAZINE, 1997, "Top Freeware & Shareware of the Year" issue page 210, #1/first entry in fact (my work is there)
PC-WELT FEB 1998 - page 84, again, my work is featured there
WINDOWS MAGAZINE, WINTER 1998 - page 92, insert section, MUST HAVE WARES, my work is again, there
PC-WELT FEB 1999 - page 83, again, my work is featured there
CHIP Magazine 7/99 - page 100, my work is there
GERMAN PC BOOK, Data Becker publisher "PC Aufrusten und Repairen" 2000, where my work is contained in it
HOT SHAREWARE Numero 46 issue, pg. 54 (PC ware mag from Spain), 2001 my work is there, first one featured, yet again!
Also, a British PC Mag in 2002 for many utilities I wrote, saw it @ BORDERS BOOKS but didn't buy it... by that point, I had moved onto other areas in this field besides coding only...
Being paid for an article that made me money over @ PCPitstop in 2008 for writing up a guide that has people showing NO VIRUSES/SPYWARES & other screwups, via following its point, such as THRONKA sees here -> http://www.xtremepccentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=ee926d913b81bf6d63c3c7372fd2a24c&t=28430&page=3
It's also been myself helping out the folks at the UltraDefrag64 project (a 64-bit defragger for Windows), in showing them code for how to do Process Priority Control @ the GUI usermode/ring 3/rpl 3 level in their program (good one too), & being credited for it by their lead dev & his team... see here -> http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/handbook/Credits.html or here http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2993462&group_id=199532&atid=969873
AND lastly: http://g-off.net/software/a-python-repeatable-threadingtimer-class where I got other programmer's work WORKING RIGHT (in PyThon no less, which I just started learning only 2 week ago no less) by showing them how to use a "Dummy Proxy Function" as I call it, to make a RepeatTimer class (Thread sub-class really) to take PARAMETERIZED FUNCTIONS, ala:
def apkthreadlaunch():
getnortonsafeweb(sAPKFileName = "APK_1_NortonSafeWeb360Extracted.txt".rstrip())
a = RepeatTimer(900, apkthread
In other words, the internet has a guilty conscience for expressing such a sad display of blubbering over Jobs, a man who was well known to be a world-class selfish asshole regardless of any accomplishments under his belt.
I think it's disrespectful that suddenly so many people are showing such mock interest in a man who they normally wouldn't give a shit about. What a ridiculous society we live in, that they use a man's death to justify prior overreactions.
If every important technology figure who dies from this point forward doesn't get the same respectable coverage that Dennis Ritchie has, then they only further disrespect him by proving my point.
Okay. Its not hard, its tedious, but you're basically describing what happens when I work in assembly.
I take it that you have not written programs in BCPL then. C is nicer in that the different data types (char, short, int, ...) compile down to different machine level instructions. Handling characters (ie single bytes) in BCPL is not nice, floats - were single precision (assuming 32 bit words). So not the same as what you do in assembler.
I do miss a few things from BCPL like VALOF/RESULTIS almost anywhere, it also used ':=' for assignment - I wonder how many many years of debugging time would have been saved if C had used that rather than a simple '=' ?
Too bad they made it all implementation dependent, making porting (original) C a major pain in the butt. Not to mention all those clever hacks that made typing C so easy, but mistyping another pain in the butt, esp. with the overly powerful pointer arithmetics.
Fandroids hate facts.
Woz hasn't done shit since 1978. His last achievement was Apple II, and then not all of it. The Macintosh was Steve's baby in all but the name (Jef Raskin contributed the name). Apple was Steve's baby in all _including_ the name (it was named after the farm commune he went to in his early 20's). That's not to say Woz was not important early on, but he hasn't done shit for the company for the past 30+ years aside from getting in line and buying products.
Praise for Dennis Ritchie += 1
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
I am so excited that members of the community finally came out and publically supported this figure whom we have all admired for so long. I can't think of another individual who has inspired so many members of the tech community to feel better about themselves - if only for a few virtual minutes - in our times of loneliness and isolation. Many of us as young men spent hours on the internet when there was even the hint of some unreleased file, image, or video. I know that I personally would never have bothered to learn how to configure a firewall if it wasn't for my being so inspired to get that torrent of Wild Things... And though we may have publically mocked her as a nuclear physicist in that Bond movie , we all secretly know exactly what "Christmas" present we wanted to see unwrapped...
What? Dennis?
oh... nevermind...
Jobs is old news, and no-one has though of a Steve day. As much as Dennis Ritchie has contributed to UNIX and C, I can't see any reason why he should have an official day for him. In the end we all die.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
"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."
1) I didn't know that there was a 'Steve Jobs' day. I predict it will be rapidly forgotten.
2) Yes, a Dennis Ritchie day is more appropriate. Same as when Ronald Knuth were to die.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
So you haven't actually done anything in 10 years and know nothing about modern operating systems? How nice of you. The only programs you have for show are some little freeware utilities that do exactly one thing. Writing such programs isn't especially hard or time-taking. I bet I did more complicated projects when I was 10 years old.
The day should be a memorial to the millions of man years and thousands of lives lost to pointer errors and uncaught arithmetic errors due to the fact that the C language provides no facilities for helping in their prevention.
And yet in your stupid hosts file stuff you use 127.0.0.1 and flood your local HTTP daemon and other ports with useless requests that need to time out EVERY FUCKING TIME, SLOWING DOWN BROWSER AND WHOLE SYSTEM as more threads need do be created and applications need to wait for the time out.
Maybe you're too stupid to see why this i a problem, but that wouldn't surprise me BECAUSE YOU'RE A NOOB AND JUST GOT SERVED!
64k? You had 64k? When the price fell on SRAM we built a 32k expansion board for our TI9900 based industrial computers and we thought Christmas had arrived already. That was the first multitasking kernel I ever worked on. I still have to remind myself that just one of those controlled an automated test and measurement plant that literally caused engineers to stand open-mouthed and then ask "how did you do that?". Nowadays, we would use a network of controllers to handle that job. Something did go a bit wrong, somewhere.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Yes, because turning off your local DNS cache in favor hosts file REALLY SPEEDS THINGS UP. Look noob, why don't you put slashdot.org to your hosts file as 127.0.0.1 AND GO TALK ABOUT HOSTS FILE THERE ALONE.
And yet you're just a noob free/shareware author. Best of all, you've only done your little freeware programs back TWO DECADES AGO and yet still, in 2011, you look back at that time and think how such a great person you have been. Hilarious. Would you let your teen age little freeware crap programs die already and move to adult age here in the 2010's?
I am a professional software author. I would say too, but you're not. I work for a very successful company along with other highly skilled persons. Do you know why you don't? Because you're a noob who developed some freeware crap back in the 90's and nothing anymore. I have developed software for machines that have been used to battle, defeat and destroy hundreds of thousands enemy combatants and terrorists. My software has changed a lot of things in this world. All you have developed is some little crappy programs and go on and on about hosts file like it's some new miracle. You know what, HOSTS FILE SUCKS.
I can't show my projects to you because they are classified information. Unlike your little freeware programs.
Where is your league, in diapers?
And where did you get your magical computer skills, oh my apk? What school you went to? What you did when you were a teen?
And how is your marriage now? Or are you a hippy single guy with lots of girlfriends and you all just have casual sex with no commitments?
Guess my last comment did its job as now you talk like a normal person again :-D
So you're still a virgin?
It's funny you still do this "others are commenting here too" shit apk, it's the same thing every time. You're not fooling anyone apk.
Hey apk.. I mean, mr. anonymous guy who isn't apk. Do you even know how to code with PHP?
How is that related to PHP in any way?
You don't need webserver or MySQL for PHP. You can make standalone command line programs with it too. Hell, you can even make Windows programs!
Apple computer happened when Steve Jobs convinced Steve Wozniak that there was a market for his then unnamed 6502 computer with built in terminal. There may have been an Apple Computer without Woz, but it wouldn't be the Apple Computer we know. If that Apple Computer hadn't developed the Lisa, the GUI may have stayed in Xerox's closet for a lot longer. I don't know if C and UNIX would have happened without Dennis Ritchie, but they made a huge impact on the computer industry. Just about anything you do with a computer today involves something pioneered by UNIX and probably directly involves C. I can't imagine what a world without UNIX and C would be like.
They are and were all great men and who is the greatest is completely subjective, but one thing is for certain: the world could have been a lot different without just one of them.
404: sig not found.