Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Wish I had mod points, he should have received 10x the number of accolades than Jobs. But I guess marketing always wins
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...
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)