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Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

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Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#131

Post by johnritchie »

prdonahue wrote: post #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".

Wow, I was that high school principal, John Ritchie. I was always proud of that poster, and very proud of brother Dennis. Maybe I was in a bad mood that day, but was never annoyed by Dennis getting any attention--though both UNIX and C were beyond my powers of comprehension. Sorry about the misunderstanding.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#132

Post by mojomark »

kps wrote: post #111
acidburnNSA wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wizard's hat is labeled "su" and the huge shell that everything is mixing in is brilliant. Also note the pipes on the ceiling. This is amazing. Oregano is still around! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregano_%28software%29

That ‘Oregano’ probably belongs to the wrong decade, if not the wrong century. A thread on comp.unix.wizards suggests that it is a reference to a Berkeley developer caught crossing the US–Canada border with a bag of oregano — that was actually oregano.

"Kaffee : It was oregano, Dave. It was ten dollars' worth of oregano.

Lieutenant Dave Spradling : Yeah, but your client thought it was marijuana.

Kaffee : My client's a moron. That's not against the law.

Lieutenant Dave Spradling : Kaffee, I have people to answer to, just like you do. I'm going to charge him.

Kaffee : With what? Possession of a condiment?"

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#133

Post by lisper »

johnritchie wrote: post #131
prdonahue wrote: post #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".

Wow, I was that high school principal, John Ritchie. I was always proud of that poster, and very proud of brother Dennis. Maybe I was in a bad mood that day, but was never annoyed by Dennis getting any attention--though both UNIX and C were beyond my powers of comprehension. Sorry about the misunderstanding.

Welcome to HN!

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#134

Post by prdonahue »

johnritchie wrote: post #131
prdonahue wrote: post #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".

Wow, I was that high school principal, John Ritchie. I was always proud of that poster, and very proud of brother Dennis. Maybe I was in a bad mood that day, but was never annoyed by Dennis getting any attention--though both UNIX and C were beyond my powers of comprehension. Sorry about the misunderstanding.

Wow, good to hear from you! Hope post-LSRHS life has treated you well.

To be fair, I was there complaining about something as teenagers are wont to do so I probably put you in a bad mood :)

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#135

Post by dragonwriter »

einpoklum wrote: post #83
dragonwriter wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, AFAIK, VBA is just a scripting layer exposed by Excel, not what Excel uses itself.

What do you mean by "using itself"? When you write a function in an Excel cell, IIANM it's a VBA function. Excel is implemented in C++ IIRC.

> When you write a function in an Excel cell, IIANM it's a VBA function

No, its uses the Excel formula language, which isn't the same as VBA (nor is it a subset of VBA; Excel formula language expressions generally aren't valid VBA.)

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#136

Post by walleeee »

tinco wrote: post #41
bad_user wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know, as far as I know functional programming is a standard course in computer science university curriculum. I've only been part of small dev teams so far, but of those teams always more than half were university educated, and none of them continued functional programming after university. Of all my university friends only one did Haskell outside of university that I know of (maybe there's some secret Scala/…

I think there are quite a few closet "functional" programmers, who may not even consider themselves as such, doing their best to write mostly side-effect-free, declarative code within the confines of an OO or multi-paradigm language (in .NET land, functional-ish features like LINQ and pattern-matching bleeding into C# makes this easier). I also met more than one person trying to introduce F#/Scala in a pretty small .NET shop I used to work for.

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#137

Post by cat199 »

gbacon wrote: post #103
bch wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the “B” container is cracked, indicating they’ve moved on from B to C, and there’s a spool of thread (process threads?) - lots to enjoy, but oregano is still a mystery.

Possibly a reference to /{usr,var}/spool.

if it is a reference, this is probably more likely than process threads, since 'threads' as a native construct were a mid/late 90s addition to unix systems

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#138

Post by lioeters »

sritchie wrote: post #108
faizshah wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I have a copy of Views! Away from home for a few days but I can post pics of the three posters when I make it home.

Ooh, I'd love to see that - if I'm not mistaken, the third one is Feuds (or Wars?).

Re: Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

#139

Post by hodsonus »

sritchie wrote: post #108
faizshah wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I have a copy of Views! Away from home for a few days but I can post pics of the three posters when I make it home.

I would love to see this as well :)
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