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Inventor of C Dennis Ritchie Honored With Second Death (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Dennis Ritchie invented the "C" programming language, so a second round of honors comes as no surprise. Although five years ago he passed away, some confusion over a tweet started the social media avalanche known as "second death syndrome". The problem, especially if you look at it from Ritchie's perspective, is that he's been dead for five years -- exactly five years. That time gap seems to have escaped some of the biggest names in tech, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who late Wednesday tweeted out Wired's five-year-old obituary on Ritchie, thanking him for his "immense contributions." Om Malik, a partner at True Ventures and the founder of tech site GigaOm, retweeted Pichai's tribute before soon recognizing his mistake and tweeting an apology for "adding to the confusion and noise." Craig Newmark, founder of the popular online bulletin board Craigslist, also paid his respects, saying, "this guy made a huge contribution to the world."
Coming tomorrow!
love is just extroverted narcissism
They gotta dig him up and kill him again.
#DeleteChrome
Given that his death was overshadowed in the public by the passing of Steve Jobs just a week earlier, I think he deserves a second death.
We thought we cleaned that out years ago.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
. . . I must say that Dennis Ritchie DID make great contributions to computer science and he is still dead.
Especially since Steve Jobs in relative terms contributed almost nothing to the world while Ritchie is an undisputed father of modern computing.
Like any other time in life, average people care more about who's in front of the camera than who's behind.
Not that we can blame them. Out of sight, out of mind.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
We only deleted his pointer. So he's got a tombstone, but he's still alive. Little chance of finding him, though.
That's the thing about C. There's always another pointer referencing the original variable... or constant, as the case may be.
2. The C programming language
1. "Hello, world\n"
what an operator...
Twitter users are stupid motherfuckers.
Congrats, Amy Winehouse.
5 years sober!
A week later, DMR passes, who was arguably a greater contributor than Jobs, yet no memorial appeared on Google's home page. One of the excuses given was that potential destinations for a memorial link wouldn't be able to handle the traffic. Even after being called on it during a company meeting, Google management remained unswayed.
I thought their handling of the affair was rather ad-hoc and sloppy -- not in line with the company's image at all.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
The first one was SIGTERM and the second one was SIGKILL
"some of the biggest names in tech" turned out to be three. And big is a bit subjective. I never heard of "Om Malik, a partner at True Ventures and the founder of tech site GigaOm" before, and I only know the third guy since he is the Craig in Craig's list.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Wish I had mod points, he should have received 10x the number of accolades than Jobs. But I guess marketing always wins
Well, he's not dead yet.
Fight Spammers!
Abe Vigoda finds this story very amusing.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Their image as an ad hoc, sloppy megalithic corporate monopoly crushing the world under the symbolic weight of its own self-importance?
Previous story
Is there a statute of limitations on duplicate stories?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Rounded corners come and go, but pointers are forever....
I was angry that Jobs was receiving all the death press when DMR died. Dennis was a great, soft-spoken, man. Met him a few times. Had a beer with him at a Usenix hospitality suite many many years ago.
If any one tiny group of people are, from a "root cause" point of view, responsible for the amazing technology we are experiencing today, it would have to be
Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and Brian Kernighan. There is a *tremendous* amount of infrastructure code written in C, and Unix is still everywhere,
in its guise as Linux, *BSD, and MacOS.
I propose that we have an annual day dedicated to DMR. He quietly did more to change the world in positive ways than any politician, living or dead, in recent memory...
Doesn't he use his company's product?
He could have at least Bing'd Ritchie's bio. Maybe looked on WiKipedia?
And where are all the hypercritical internet dorks who would call regular people 'morons' for making such a stupid mistake?
I know, it's a Google CEO. It's not like he'd know anything about computing r technology - advertising - but not tech.
As long as you believe all that matters is engineering, people will fail to utilize the technology that engineering can bring.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
On the contrary engineers would use it utilize it anyway and the morons ultimately would fall behind and be culled for the benefit of the human race.
All douche bags,
Whats twitter's sysadmin's pupose in this??
Nicely done. You just lumped Steve Jobs in with Arnold "the Knife" Morris.
The Pitchman
Sure, sharpened steel is a great technology, but will people actually use it unless first impressed by a delightfully manicured tomato? ... But wait, there's more!
Steve's legendary pineapple was his insistence that RISC would blow CISC out of the water. That pineapple never danced (excluding, for a while, one or two hand-picked Photoshop effects). Miraculously, it still hasn't danced.
Why Linus Torvalds Prefers x86 Over ARM
How could this be? Let's dissect.
The Underappreciated True Story of 48-Year-Old Boxer Bernard Hopkins
That sure sounds like the 8088 I knew and loved.
Ditto.
To it's credit, The DEC Alpha actually landed a punch. Others, not so much.
It was AMD that finally provided the magic milkshake.
Ye olde 8088 has sure come a long way.
Where x86 went up in weight class, Jobs ultimately—not with the once-franchise iMac, but the iPhone—successfully went down in weight class. That much-vaunted 10" chef knife went nowhere fast after decades of trying, but he stuck with it—full marks—and finally made a freaking fortune on pastel-coloured paring knives.
Meanwhile, Ritchie improved steel. Advantage: Ritchie.
It's a false comparison... Ritchie was *very* well known with computer guys; particularly programmers/developers... which Jobs hired many.
Jobs did what he did as a business, yet he also had a thorough understanding of the technologies involved; such as OOP- otherwise he wouldn't have had the rational in choosing Objective-C as a basis for his NextStep OS in the mid 1980's.. which eventually evolved into Mac OS X and iOS.
Meh, is that such a bad thing? With a small number of exceptions (health and transport) most "visible" tech is a big pile of who-cares anyway. Frankly I often wonder if we wouldn't be happier as a society if we just dumped 90% of it and went back to secretaries, a typing pool and accountants adding up long lines of figures in an old-school ledger.
(I didn't used to be so cynical, but age and experience help).
Sad considering Ken Thompson works for google.
Maybe we should honor him every 5 years.
wasn't he "dmr" or is this another headline fail?
I may not *like* Steve Jobs either; but I don't deny his impact on the world of computing.
I intend to honor him on my twitter feed every five years until 2038 to allow him four more honors. Then my plan is to curse the day he was born before 1970 leading to a signed time_t!
Also, every 5 years, the anti-forward of the Unix Haters Handbook should be read aloud.
UHH is available for free at: http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~weise/uhh-download.html
And if you believe sales is everything, it' just a bunch of guys selling rocks to each other.
Given that his death was overshadowed in the public by the passing of Steve Jobs just a week earlier, I think he deserves a second death.
One thing many would want is to be remembered long after their death, Google gave Dennis Ritchie not only that honor but brought back Dennis Ritchie as a person of great importance.
>which Jobs hired many.
and promptly setup secret "no poaching" agreements with other companies to keep developer pay/benefits down.
I must have missed it, but why did Pichai do the tweet in the first place? It almost looks like a mistake.
I dispute that Ritchie is the father of modern computing. Von Neumann has that honor.
Ritchie also worked on Plan 9 and Inferno, but they're overshadowed by Unix. So much so that they aren't even mentioned in his Wikipedia article.
Lesson: don't underestimate the importance of marketing.
> Maybe we should honor him every 5 years.
Only until 2038.
> He never married, he never had a girlfriend, and some people who knew him suspected that he was completely celibate.
If he never married, that makes him celibate in the original sense.
You sound like you're up for a promotion. Hope you'll be able to deal with the disillusion when you come to realize that upper management isn't what you think it's supposed to be. That in most not privately owned companies it's a way to dodge doing actual work with cluelessly spouting BS.
Steve and the rest of the world wouldn't have been where we're now if it weren't for a handful of brilliant people like Ritchie, Thompson, and Joy to name a few off the top of my head.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
> Given that his death was overshadowed [...] by the passing of Steve Jobs [...]
While we are at it: could we kill this guy a second time? Just to be sure...
Steve produced an awful lot of pretty things that flopped.
In fact, contrary to all the hype at the time the original iPhone was largely a flop, shifting a pathetic 6 million units, where even Nokia's run of the mill N95 broke 10 million. This was mostly because they failed to give the original iPhone the necessary engineering time for things that people had been expecting in their phones for years beforehand, such as GPS/mapping, MMS, apps and so on and so forth.
It wasn't until they allowed engineering to actually build these things into the device that it became popular.
Macs are pretty and covered in Steve Jobs' magic dust, but they're still a negligible fraction of the market compared to Windows/Linux PCs that are engineered products first and foremost. Android devices were never as pretty and fancy as the iPhone, yet they outsell them 4-1. There are plenty of cars with all sorts of fancy designs and gadgets, but the ones that sell the best in the UK (I don't know other markets) are the ones that are solid, practical, and do the job like the Fiesta, Corsa, Astra, and Focus. There were all sorts of search engines covered with various amounts of magic, but Google destroyed them all when it just gave us a page with a logo and a fucking search box that worked and nothing else.
Pretty and "magical" is popular amongst a small crowd of self-obsessed hipsters who confuse themselves with the majority, but the reality is the vast majority of people (like, 80%+) just want a practical and well engineered product. Fluff, fashion, and pixie dust is grossly overrated. There's money in it for sure, but that's not the same thing as what the vast majority of people prefer to utilise.
That's because despite all the supposed animosity in the news between tech companies like Google and Apple the reality is that the top tech CEOs are all best friends. Gates, Jobs, Schmidt, they all know each other and spend time with each other.
Ritchie wasn't a top tech CEO. Now I completely agree with you, but my point is that the decision wasn't made at Google based on contribution, it was made based on personal relationships at the top. Recognise that and it'll make a lot more sense.
Photos from 2010, at the hight of the supposed Google-Apple smartphone animosity:
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker...
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker...
This FWIW is also why there were issues with collusion on keeping salaries down by agreeing not to take each others employees - because whatever the supposed competition between the companies, the bosses just wanted to keep on getting rich together at the end of the day.
It's important to becareful not to conflate the public image of companies like Google with the reality of the fact that they're still out to make money, and their bosses are still very human, and make very human decisions and mistakes. As companies go Google et. al. do quite well at keeping things decent (They're certainly no News International for example), but ultimately you'll never eliminate human faults like greed and selfishness from the process whilst humans remain involved in it.
If by "utilize" you mean "buy the shiny one from the gleaming white Apple store" then yeah, maybe... But it's not like Apple were the only ones bringing engineering to the masses, if by masses I mean "people who can afford a $1000 phone".
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I dispute that Ritchie is the father of modern computing.
The GP said "Ritchie is an undisputed father of modern computing", not the father. Seems there were several fathers.
I read the GP that wrong way too at first : "Father" is not a good analogy in the case of several founders.
Only in the sense that every god is an overhyped individual that turns out to be just another charlatan.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
It makes it sound like a personal medical condition rather than someone else having a memory failure.
I guess it's just an aspect of fame\notoriety. You don't forget that someone you were personally acquainted with is dead, but someone you knew of but never actually met is a different matter.
...reading the newsline, for a second I feared that somebody created, after Second Life, Second Death.
Especially since Steve Jobs in relative terms contributed almost nothing to the world
Except bring the world's first recognizable PC (hardware) to the masses with the first Apple. He also brought the windows model of UI to the masses too. I'm no fan of Apple, and never liked the reality distortion field around Jobs, but Jobs had drive and vision, and you need guys like that to harness the engineers.
while Ritchie is an undisputed father of modern computing.
His flavors of OS and language won out, both of which were based on previous designs. Calling him the "undisputed father of modern computing" is ridiculous.
He quietly did more to change the world in positive ways than any politician
Then how do you explain that tunnels and bridges in NYC are currently being renamed after passed away senators and not technology pioneers? Changing the world does not equate having connections, that's why!
...they just get casted to void.
Ritchie's death reported twice? He above all people could appreciate an "off by 1" error.
If a death happens on the internet, and no one pays attention to the obituary, did it occur?
The article links to a page with an autoplaying video, with sound, click at your own risk.
Sonofabee, you're right! A thousand pardons.
Steve wasn't unaware of that. He mentioned in Triumph of the Nerds how incredibly lucky he felt to be in exactly the right place and the right time in Silicon Valley where the invention of the PC took form.
Still, nothing he and Woz did to start Apple depended in any way on what Ritchie, Thompson and Joy did. The Apple I and Apple II owed their existence more to Motorola more than Bell Labs.
Ritchie was aware of the safety issues, and that other safer approaches were possible - but slow. He deliberately allowed such risky behavior because their team valued efficiency, elegance and simplicity over hand-holding.
He allowed dangerous features in C because it was intended for programmers who knew what they were doing, instead of amateurs.
The =/= an. The GP indicated that Richie was one of the fathers, not the only one. I would add in Von Neumann, Turing, the NSA and NASA personally to the list, but there are many who contributed largely to the modern day computer and brought the whole technology we use daily into being.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Even calling him "a" father is too much. His flavors won out, but they were not groundbreaking. I'd actually rate what Jobs accomplished higher.
Von Neumann and Turing, yup I agree. But I think the king is Douglas Engelbart, whose Mother of All Demos defined modern day computing as we know it today, in 1968. He was 20 years ahead of his time.
Respawn?