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Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

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Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#51

Post by tartoran »

ratww wrote: post #43
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I liked procedural languages better than functional ones. (Emphasis, mine). I suspect that he understood functional languages quite well. He just didn't like them. I like some aspects of FP, but there are other aspects that I don't like. My own development style is a ghastly chimera of techniques, technologies and jargon that coagulate into a disgusting bouillabaisse that makes everyone go "tsk, tsk," but that alwa…

> I like some aspects of FP, but there are other aspects that I don't like. Care to enumerate? Asking because I feel the same: I really enjoy immutability, first class functions, map/filter/reduce, Option and powerful types (I dislike: currying, point-free, monads), but at the same time I feel more at home doing that in imperative-ish languages like C#, JS/TS and Rust where I can have guard if s and the odd mutation…

Have you tried F#? Its brevity makes quite nice but it’s not functionally pure, you can use OOP where you are more comfortable

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#52

Post by atrettel »

I am not surprised about the effort it took to find a copy of Ritchie's dissertation. Dissertations tend to be difficult to find if they are not already listed on WorldCat or in ProQuest. But the museum used the best method in this case: talk to people close to people who had a copy at one point. In my experience when all else fails, this strategy is the primary one that ends up working. It doesn't work all the time, and I still am looking for a few "ancient" technical reports despite some sustained effort on my part, but I have been able to find several documents/reports just by asking the right people.

Does anybody else have similar experiences? I'm interested if there are other avenues that somebody could try as well.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#53

Post by tartoran »

tmh88j wrote: post #4
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.

>Kids: If you meet your heroes, say something. "Thank you" is good if you don't have the words. I'm a huge gearhead. I live in the US, but a few years ago I was in Rome for work. I was out to a late lunch with my boss and was explaining that one of my favorite boutique car manufacturers, Pagani, is just south of Napoli and that I wanted to take a weekend trip to visit their facilities. No later than 10 minutes did Mr…

Nicest thing is to meet and interact amazing people and not know who they are, makes for a more natural exchange IMO

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#54

Post by IncRnd »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #42
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.

> I liked procedural languages better than functional ones. (Emphasis, mine). I suspect that he understood functional languages quite well. He just didn't like them. I like some aspects of FP, but there are other aspects that I don't like. My own development style is a ghastly chimera of techniques, technologies and jargon that coagulate into a disgusting bouillabaisse that makes everyone go "tsk, tsk," but that alwa…

Ritchie: I liked procedural languages better than functional ones.

ChrisMarshallNY: I suspect that he understood functional languages quite well. He just didn't like them.

Your statement doesn't follow from Ritchie's words that you quoted. Preference of A over B does not have the logical consequence that B is disliked. It doesn't even imply that A is intensely liked.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#55

Post by oh_sigh »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #42
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.

> I liked procedural languages better than functional ones. (Emphasis, mine). I suspect that he understood functional languages quite well. He just didn't like them. I like some aspects of FP, but there are other aspects that I don't like. My own development style is a ghastly chimera of techniques, technologies and jargon that coagulate into a disgusting bouillabaisse that makes everyone go "tsk, tsk," but that alwa…

The link on your about page to your LinkedIn profile is broken

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#56

Post by shpongled »

ratww wrote: post #48
brmgb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dislike: currying, point-free, monads Don't worry then, that's fine, you just dislike Haskell. I personally really like functional programming but can't stand Haskell. The style favoured by the community is optimised to be the most impenetrable possible. You should try Ocaml. The preferred style favours piping to point-free and uses monads sparingly. Currying is everywhere but copious use of named arguments tends…

Ah, funny thing: I worked with Haskell professionally for a while. I even enjoy the laziness. My biggest gripe with it is not so much the language itself but the culture: it favours bloated and pompous solutions much in the same way Java/Spring does. Monad Lifting, Lenses, Aspects and FactoryFactories occupy the same space in my head. I guess I just prefer both the simple side of functional and the simple side of imp…

OCaml/Standard ML are both pretty nice because you can still use mutation, and the languages are significantly simpler than Haskell.

My only gripe with them is that there seems to be a culture of having zero type annotations (due to HM), which can make reading other people's code difficult.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#57

Post by IncRnd »

jimhefferon wrote: post #37
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.

Is it possible that "functional programming" meant as in Kleene's Introduction to Metamathematics , where the work has a mathematical flavor with recursive functions, in contrast with FORTRAN or ALGOL or whatever language DR was using on physical machines at the time?

That's a good point. I wonder if functional programming, at least partially, referred to the array programming of APL.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#58

Post by codr7 »

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…

The thing with admiration and fame is it isn't as positive as we like to think.

No one ever did anything worth mentioning for others to admire them, they did it because they had to for whatever reasons.

Treating them the same as you would any other person is likely to have a more positive effect.

I've had some really interesting interactions with famous people I didn't even recognize until later.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#59

Post by kazinator »

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.

The best indicator of prevailing fashion is that the most popular languages are imperative or multi-paradigm, and some of them are descendants (at least in some aspects) of one made by Ritchie.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#60

Post by slim »

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 guess it's also dependent on culture. for instance in my mediterranean culture people are much more expressive and sometimes tend to be over-appreciative with strangers. which I feel is sometimes disconforting because harassing if you're a celebrity
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