Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation • Hacker News Board

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#21

Post by mettamage » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 8:31 AM UTC

searchableguy wrote: post #12

mettamage wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When approaching strangers, saying something appreciative in a respectful way is neutral at absolute worst and quite amazing at best. Case in point: Andrew Tanenbaum: I said that his work was amazing and thanked him. He shrugged me off. I think he felt busy or didn’t care. I was happy that he listened. Jane McGonigal: retweeted my question while I had 0 followers and followed about 10 people. A semi-famous Dutch rapp…

> Andrew Tanenbaum: I said that his work was amazing and thanked him. He shrugged me off. I think he felt busy or didn’t care. I was happy that he listened. I have the same reaction to people thanking me out of nowhere especially when I am deep into my own thoughts and it's awkward to say something after the shrug. The realisation comes latter. So there is a chance he did appreciate your thank you but couldn't reply…

Ah, that's also an explanation.

I tend to take the most optimistic interpretation.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#22

Post by inopinatus » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 8:37 AM UTC

unixhero wrote: post #20

tinco wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Functional programming languages have alway been somewhat dismissed by most. Even though every once in a while functional programming becomes somewhat of a hot topic, only few programmers actually take it up as their main or favourite programming style. I'd say Ritchie's attitude there is and was kind of mainstream. I suppose just as C (or C style languages) have been mainstream for the past 40 years.

Except every non programmer with a business degree seem to love functional programming: Microsoft Excel

I’ve heard this before, but long felt it is more like logic programming: you declare facts and relationships, then an evaluation engine finds results.

Not saying you can’t, say, pass around closures in Excel but it’s far from natural. Whilst spreadsheets always remind me, more than anything, of the Prolog I took in college, and not the Lisp or ML.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#23

Post by dna_polymerase » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 8:42 AM UTC

tinco wrote: post #16

dang wrote: post #10

> My graduate school experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be an expert in the theory of algorithms and also that I liked procedural languages better than functional ones. I wonder if that last bit was as unfashionable a statement when he made it as it would be now.

Functional programming languages have alway been somewhat dismissed by most. Even though every once in a while functional programming becomes somewhat of a hot topic, only few programmers actually take it up as their main or favourite programming style. I'd say Ritchie's attitude there is and was kind of mainstream. I suppose just as C (or C style languages) have been mainstream for the past 40 years.

Hated functional programming in university, now wish there was wider industry adoption. Deep diving into FP made me think more about the code, rather than just writing it in an OO-Language.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#24

Post by 082349872349872 » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 8:44 AM UTC

Taniwha wrote: post #18

So what would happen if we took up a collection, produced a bound copy, and sent it off to Harvard?

Might be difficult. I couldn't turn up any policy in brief surfing, but the only posthumous degrees I found were non-doctoral, and https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/mary-whiton-calkin... doesn't bode well.

(I'm probably just cynical, but if we took up a large enough collection, I'd bet they'd be willing to grant a degree in lieu of naming a building.)

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#25

Post by sradman » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 8:58 AM UTC

W0lf wrote: post #9

So after reading this, is it correct to say that Ritchie basically showed in his thesis the application of the for loop for recursive prime number computation and also its application to computational complexity? AFAIK for loops where already known at the time since they first appeared in ALGOL a little earlier?

TLDR; Gödel’s incompleteness theorem rests on recursive functions which can be expressed as looping programs, i.e., for() loops. Dennis Ritchie’s PHD thesis, which was never accepted by Harvard because he refused to pay for a bound copy required for submission, demonstrated that the complexity of looping programs is determined by the degree of nesting.

Ritchie did not seem to be driven by status seeking but instead by the urge to build things.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#26

Post by throwaway_pdp09 » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 8:59 AM UTC

mettamage wrote: post #3

linsomniac wrote: post #2

When I was a teen, K&R The C Programming Language changed my life. Years later I shared an elevator with him at Usenix. I always regretted not saying something to him, but I didn't have the words. Kids: If you meet your heroes, say something. "Thank you" is good if you don't have the words.

When approaching strangers, saying something appreciative in a respectful way is neutral at absolute worst and quite amazing at best. Case in point: Andrew Tanenbaum: I said that his work was amazing and thanked him. He shrugged me off. I think he felt busy or didn’t care. I was happy that he listened. Jane McGonigal: retweeted my question while I had 0 followers and followed about 10 people. A semi-famous Dutch rapp…

> I never looked at cleaners the same way again.

Cleaners are people and are as complex, multi-faceted and interesting as anyone. No-one ignored me when I was a cleaner (I'm not a person to let them!), but I knew a girl who cleaned at a uni and she felt the students ignored her. She was a great person and they would have loved to have known her, she would have loved them back, it could have been great, but they probably didn't see her and I think she felt they were above her, and didn't try (well, smart students at a uni, she was a menial worker etc).

So the gap was never bridged - and had it been bridged, simply being acknowledged and chatted to by them, and appreciated as a person, would have helped her through a truly terrible time in her life. As well as making her job much nicer in the not-awful parts of her life.

People often don't see cleaners, cleaners/janitors/maintenance etc. sometimes they feel overawed or outclassed or something and scared off. Learn to see them, learn to say hello, let them know they are appreciated (as people, not as cleaners etc). It makes a huge difference to someone's work of scrubbing the floors, it really does. Like I said, it was my job once.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#27

Post by bad_user » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 9:48 AM UTC

tinco wrote: post #16

dang wrote: post #10

> My graduate school experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be an expert in the theory of algorithms and also that I liked procedural languages better than functional ones. I wonder if that last bit was as unfashionable a statement when he made it as it would be now.

Functional programming languages have alway been somewhat dismissed by most. Even though every once in a while functional programming becomes somewhat of a hot topic, only few programmers actually take it up as their main or favourite programming style. I'd say Ritchie's attitude there is and was kind of mainstream. I suppose just as C (or C style languages) have been mainstream for the past 40 years.

Education is an issue. Very few programmers actually know what functional programming even is or how it can help.

Also 40 years ago we had what? LISP as is commonly used is not an FP language. ML was nice but there wasn't much FP done in ML either.

The advancements to make FP practical, like good garbage collectors, laziness, monads, good persistent data structures, are newer.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#28

Post by verytrivial » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 9:49 AM UTC

Taniwha wrote: post #18

So what would happen if we took up a collection, produced a bound copy, and sent it off to Harvard?

Policy or not, it would perhaps be nice to deposit a copy anyway. Put the ball in their court so to speak, even if Harvard does nothing further.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#29

Post by einpoklum » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 10:19 AM UTC

unixhero wrote: post #20

tinco wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Functional programming languages have alway been somewhat dismissed by most. Even though every once in a while functional programming becomes somewhat of a hot topic, only few programmers actually take it up as their main or favourite programming style. I'd say Ritchie's attitude there is and was kind of mainstream. I suppose just as C (or C style languages) have been mainstream for the past 40 years.

Except every non programmer with a business degree seem to love functional programming: Microsoft Excel

Umm, doesn't Excel use Visual Basic (VBA) under the hood?

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#30

Post by morelisp » Sat, Jun 20, 2020, 10:28 AM UTC

I didn't read the thesis itself yet but I feel like some key point must be missing from the article. The "loop programs" described are nearly identical to the "abacus machine" presented in the textbook Computability and Logic (pp. 55-56 3rd ed.) which cites Joachim Lambek who published "How to Program an Infinite Abacus" in 1961 which seems to also be trivially close in structure (not merely equivalent).

Lambek in turn cites Melzak's "An Informal Arithmetical Approach to Computability and Computation" which not identical - it has transfer and arbitrary compare branch instructions - but that seems a compromise for pedagogical purposes as deriving both from the "abacus" seems fairly trivial to me.