There’s a recent complaint at TMR Central that we haven’t marked the death of Dennis Ritchie (C and Unix Pioneer Dennis Ritchie Reported Dead).
Well, this isn’t an obituary column, and I personally never liked Steve Jobs much anyhow, but here you go. Kudos to Dennis Ritchie for a life well-lived and for his many achievements.
Foremost amongst these are Unix (33%-ish) and C (50%-ish). I use both, quite often (Unix perhaps not often enough), so I am indebted to 83% of the man.
And while it is true that Unix is at base a lab-rat’s response to the Multics money-spigot being turned off, and C is beholden to B (related to my old college programming language, BCPL2 by Martin Richards1), the fact that both of Dennis’ progeny survive robustly into the 2010s is honestly very impressive.
He also wrote a very, very funny Anti-Foreword to the Unix-Haters’ Handbook.
In his last twenty years or so, he apparently devoted himself to extending Unix into Outer Space with Plan9, which may or may not be releasing a B-Movie version on DVD soon.
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Actually, Dennis sounds like a fine chap, ideally suited to a lab environment like AT&T. And I’m pretty certain that he was a much, much, nicer man in person than Steve Jobs.
And it’s quite a fitting obituary he has over on Reddit.
I think we should indeed retire UID 7 in his honour. One small step for mankind, and all that. After that we can:
int i;
for (i = 0; i < 7;) {
retire (i++);
}
for ( ; ;) {
retire (++i);
}
The world will be a better place, although your CPU will not thank you for it.
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And two of those related trademarks are a form of pissing on the Loons, btw. I actually think that Dennis would have approved … although he certainly wouldn’t have approved of the other three.
I wonder what his views on Objective-C were?
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[1] Special reference for IMGX64, who I know loves this sort of thing. Apologies that it’s Twinkiepedia.
But it’s pretty much how I remember it. Apart from that huge great glob of static nonsense, of course (the curse of BCPL). At least it managed a rudimentary understanding of the stack, and an early idealised form of “words.” And it did this before Algol68, mind you.
[2] Oh, OK. Here.
Comments
Hats off to Ritchie. Today we’ve got with some random bloke at facebook discussion about all the noise around the Jobs’ death and the 2 liner on osnews about Ritchie’s and I have a picture for you (although the pic is a bit too much for me, Im neither Jobs’ fanboy, nor I hate him)
http://i.imgur.com/76RkJ.png
“There’s a recent complaint at TMR Central that we haven’t marked the death of Dennis Ritchie”
I would say, “So what?” This is an place with a specific subject matter (or two) and, as you say, not the obituary column on the local paper. If every time someone that may or may not be in one way or another influential (and I use the word “influential” pretty loosely here) kicks the bucket, we will be swamped with notices that have nothing to do with the relevant issues that this site is meant for and everything to do with personal views on personal achievements that are laden with emotional bias (due to the nature of life and death themselves) and hero worshipping and starved of pragmatic opinions that this site needs.
Call me a jerk if you want, but there is a time and a place for everything, and TMR is not a suited place for this kind of stuff.
And, yes, that’s my opinion.
It was meant ironically, Joe.
And, I hope, with a suitable measure of respect for the deceased.
C and the anti-foreword were both, for different reasons, achievements of which I would be proud.
“[2] Oh, OK. Here.”
That’s just amazing. A whole “language manual” in 27 pages! [insert C++[1] standard joke here]
Of course, a language manual is not a standard, but you can’t find many comprehensive C++ books in less than 1000 pages.
[1] an SQL joke is also appropriate, but I think the C++ standard is more widely known. I happen to have a copy of the SQL-2003 standard. 3700+ pages, the foundation alone is 1300+ pages.
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