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R.I.P. Dennis Ritchie, 1941 - 2011

M

Mike Chambers

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my apologies if somebody already posted this here, i didn't see anything.

dennis ritchie, father of C and co-creator of UNIX died yesterday.

Dennis_MacAlistair_Ritchie_.jpg


^seen here being awarded the National Medal of Technology by bill clinton.

sad. jobs, ritchie.... who's next? this type of thing always happens in threes. not to diminish jobs' accomplishments, but ritchie imo had a larger impact on modern computing than jobs did.
 
Back in the usenet/ARPAnet days, I had a lot of fun reading his "What does this do?" quizzes.

It certainly does seem to be a year for attending funerals. I seem to be attending more memorial services nowadays.
 
i wish i was alive then! was this pre-80's usenet? the more i read about ritchie, the more i realize what a genius he really was. it's a shame he won't get even close to the recognition jobs has been getting in the public press.
 
the reason i give him more credit than jobs, basically everything anybody is doing on their computer right now can be traced directly back to Ritchie's influence somehow. hell, even almost every Apple product is heavily influenced by the work of Ritchie!
 
Mike Chambers said:
the reason i give him more credit than jobs, basically everything anybody is doing on their computer right now can be traced directly back to Ritchie's influence somehow. hell, even almost every Apple product is heavily influenced by the work of Ritchie!
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Well, as Mac OSX is basically running Unix at the bottom layer.. so yes. And NeXT, which Jobs founded and Apple bought, was also Unix-based. And built around the Object-C compiler, which is of course a descendant of Ritchie's C compiler (well, presumably all those Object-oriented languages also have Simula in their ancestry somewhere).

Two of my three mobile phones here on this table run a Linux kernel (Nokia N900, and a Chinese Android phone), and the TV at home too. Linux was of course designed as a Unix clone. Hm, everything around me in this office is, with a few exceptions, circulating around Unix and C. The legacy of dmr.

-Tor
 
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Tor said:
Well, as Mac OSX is basically running Unix at the bottom layer.. so yes. And NeXT, which Jobs founded and Apple bought, was also Unix-based. And built around the Object-C compiler, which is of course a descendant of Ritchie's C compiler (well, presumably all those Object-oriented languages also have Simula somewhere in their ancestry somewhere).

Two of my three mobile phones here on this table runs a Linux kernel (Nokia N900, and a Chinese Android phone), and the TV at home too. Linux was of course designed as a Unix clone. Hm, everything around me in this office is, with a few exceptions, circulating around Unix and C. The legacy of dmr.

-Tor
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yes! exactly. and in many, many ways even Windows is influenced by UNIX. maybe not in the direct user experience way, but underneath the hood lots of things are similar. and if nothing else, Windows is mostly written in C. :)
 
Re: the Jobs-Ritchey publicity thing. Even the technoscenti can be myopic.

Do you think Friedrich Bauer (still with us, at last check) would deserve the same attention when he passes? Things would be very different without his contribution.

(How many of you just said "Who the !%$# is Friedrich Bauer?")
 
Chuck(G) said:
Re: the Jobs-Ritchey publicity thing. Even the technoscenti can be myopic.

Do you think Friedrich Bauer (still with us, at last check) would deserve the same attention when he passes? Things would be very different without his contribution.

(How many of you just said "Who the !%$# is Friedrich Bauer?")
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There are so many people that have contributed to our digital lives. Even the great ones stand on the shoulders of others.

Tez
 
i don't blame the press for their focus on jobs, he deserves plenty of attention. (even if he was just as underhanded as bill gates sometimes, i.e. Xerox Alto stuff. then jobs got mad that bill re-stole what he stole.)
 
Mike Chambers said:
sad. jobs, ritchie.... who's next? this type of thing always happens in threes. not to diminish jobs' accomplishments, but ritchie imo had a larger impact on modern computing than jobs did.
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did i not call it? it always works that way. john mccarthy, inventor of LISP died yesterday. october 24th.

steve jobs, dennis ritchie, and john mccarthy. dead within a couple weeks of each other.
 
Mike Chambers said:
sad. jobs, ritchie.... who's next? this type of thing always happens in threes.
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Unfortunately, you turned out to be right about the threes. Sadly, the world lost John McCarthy last Sunday. https://twitter.com/#!/stanfordeng/status/128615022044790784 :-(

To be honest, I never heard of John McCarthy until I read about his passing, unlike Dennis Ritchie and obviously Steve Jobs. I know, shame on me. Nevertheless, after reading an obituary about the man, it seems obvious that he rightfully fits right up there with the other two, as far as relevancy is concerned. May they all Rest In Peace.

not to diminish jobs' accomplishments, but ritchie imo had a larger impact on modern computing than jobs did.
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Agreed.
 
Some comments as well, you could see that Ritchie did have an impact on even Jobs and Gates from Xenix and the Next platform, well and again in OS-X to Minix and Linux. Certainly didn't go unnoticed with development ideas.
 
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