Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
"...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
Maybe he was a big fan of Chrismas Eve?
(Oct 30 = Dec24)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
...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.
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
Had Einstein not existed, somebody else would have come up with the Theory of Relativity shortly thereafter. It was just the next logical step in the development of physics. Similarly, had Ritchie not existed, all of modern computing would still work pretty much the same way it does now, using tools other people would have developed. Had Jobs not existed, Apple would probably never have got off the ground, an Apple lookalike would have come up a bit later instead, somebody else would have introduced multitouch devices, and so forth. Heck, if Walt Disney never existed, some other creations would have taken the available mindshare instead of Mickey and al. One must always keep in mind that when people invent or develop stuff, it reduces the incentives for others to redo the work. Worse yet, these people who might have done the job later on might have done it better - there was a need for a language like C, and had Ritchie not come up with C, a much better language might have taken its role. Or a worse one. We simply don't know. Basically, people deserve a lot of credit for their discoveries, but the impact of their discoveries is a poor barometer for these people's importance. The more impact a discovery has, the more likely it is that somebody will do it eventually.
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.
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.