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Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

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Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#71
Random Dennis Ritchie story: my high school principal was Dennis' brother, John, and had a "UNIX Magic" poster (https://i.imgur.com/aqg21UI.jpg) hanging in his office.

I asked him what that was about and he dismissed it with a wave of his hand, as if annoyed: "oh, just something my brother did".

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#72
post #48
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…

You’d probably like Erlang. Functional but pragmatic, an imperative core with immutability, native concurrency...it was my introduction to FP and I hope to get another shot at working with it professionally.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#73
post #68

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,…

Out of curiosity: what 'ancient' technical reports are you looking for (plus who knows someone here might know something)?

The only ancient technical report that I am looking for currently is Mark Morkovin's 1960 AGARD conference paper titled "The structure of supersonic turbulent boundary layers". This was presented at the April 1960 Boundary Layer Research Meeting of the NATO AGARD Wind Tunnel and Model Testing Panel in London.

I have tried contacting many different people about this without any success. Morkovin died in 2015 around the time I learned about the paper. His family has never responded to my correspondence and I do not believe they have a copy. The one professor who did have a copy of it threw out his collection of papers a few years before I asked him. Morkovin was a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology and they do not have it in their archives. Morkovin likely wrote the paper while working for the Martin Company (now merged into Lockheed Martin). It is likely that the paper was also filed as a Martin Company research report, but I later learned that Lockheed Martin has no copies of the Martin Company research report series since the Martin Company apparently destroyed the paper copies intentionally before the merger (I have no detail past that). NATO published other papers from this conference but not this one. They may have a copy but they have never replied to my correspondence.

I do know of a professor looking for a copy of this paper, but he has also not found it either. It would be nice to find a copy, but it's not a high priority for me.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#74
post #43

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…

I do that a lot with Reason/OCaml. It is surprising how powerful imperative, mutable programming is when most of the code you write is functional, and then you want do something a little difficult in the paradigm, and you make a `ref`, write a while loop, mutate an array, or store stuff in a global variable, and it is done! Mutation in OCaml is like a fine scalpel - extremely powerful, occasionally used, and just right on the table whenever you need it.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#75
post #18

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

People, much closer to dmr, in the past have attempted it.[0] The issue it would seem is that there is no record on file at Harvard that he ever defended his thesis. ACM does however have a Doctoral Dissertation award in his name, the irony.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2626401.2626421

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#76
post #66
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel is at its core a declarative programming language. Entering formulas in cells that reference other cells declares the relationship of the calculated cells to its referents. It is not an imperative language: the user does not tell the computer which order in which to carry out computations. It is not procedural: there is no notion writing of procedures within its cells. It is not functional: while there are buil…

> while there are built-in functions users cannot write their own in the same way. It's been a while since I've used Excel, but I thought you could write custom methods using VBA that could be called in a given cell.

You can indeed, but VBA is of course imperative, and VBA is used in part because it is difficult to read/write and considered a poor practice to have any significant chaining of functions in the spreadsheet. The bigger reason it is used, of course, is because Excel's declarative environment does not accommodate all behaviors and users prefer to implement them imperatively. So this sort of reinforces Excel as not being a functional environment.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#78
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.)

There's nothing preventing award of degrees after death, if the thesis has been defended, other than administrivia. It's not the Nobel prize.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#79
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You’d probably like Erlang. Functional but pragmatic, an imperative core with immutability, native concurrency...it was my introduction to FP and I hope to get another shot at working with it professionally.

Yeah! Actually Joe Armstrong's Programming Erlang was my true introduction to FP, got the book when it was released. Lovely language, a shame I never found an opportunity to use it after that.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#80

Random Dennis Ritchie story: my high school principal was Dennis' brother, John, and had a "UNIX Magic" poster ( https://i.imgur.com/aqg21UI.jpg ) hanging in his office. I asked him what that was about and he dismissed it with a wave of his hand, as if annoyed: "oh, just something my brother did".

Someone posted a high res scan of this on reddit if anyone else is interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/91ntoh/comment/e3...

Unfortunately no scan of the other two (feuds and views).

Here someone find a more permanent place for it: https://send.firefox.com/download/c1783a94da0e8cfa/#sklTlfgc...

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