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Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

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Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#81

Post by mp01cnb »

5hoom wrote: post #12

This is really sad. Dennis Ritchie has made an incalculably huge contribution to the tech world. I know most here would be aware, but he is a father of both Unix and the C language, technologies which are the basis for nearly everything we as developers do. He helped write K&R, which many regard as _the_ book for C programming. This is the passing of a legend. Sincerest condolences to his family and friends.

DR was someone I looked up to since writing my first C program on a VAX mini-frame. RIP.

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#82

Post by chugger »

keidian wrote: post #62
xxpor wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Including all of the tech that Steve Jobs had a significant impact on.

Exactly. When I first found out about dmr, I really really hoped the stories will flood in here after the massive Steve Jobs amount. Not to take anything away from Steve, but dmr is far more important in my opinion, and I'm sure many other geeks would agree. I'm glad he isn't just quietly being forgotten like I feared he would.

DMR created. SJ inspired.

let's not compare both.

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#84

Post by grosales »

I still remember the first time I picked up K&R. I tried my best to devour it. The technical prose makes the book a tour de force. Every time I write a new "hello world" program from now on, I will add a "Thanks dmr" at the end. May you rest in peace dmr.

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#88

Post by spudlyo »

goodnight wrote: post #36

RIP Dennis. Now that's a guy worth mourning about. I'll check CNN and the BBC to see their special reports, surely if they had them when some marketing CEO kicked the bucket they'll give at least ten times the amount of coverage to a man who was 100 times his better!

I for one wish the black bar would stop darkening our door. Both men were great in their own ways and made large contributions to our world.

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#89

Post by strait »

melling wrote: post #16
kiba wrote: post #6

70 years. That's a long time to be alive! He was born in the middle of WW2, lived through the cold war, seen the collapse of the soviet union, etc. Me? I was born around the time the Linux OS hatched and the internet is starting to open up.

70 years isn't long at all. 100 is the new old: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centenarian With a bit more research, many people could live to be 90-100.

Alan Turing would be 99 if he were alive today.

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#90

Post by luckydude »

Any chance we could get the guy who did the Steve Jobs Apple logo to take a wack at doing one for Dennis?

I've never met Dennis but I've talked to him on the phone a bit, and exchanged a pile of email over the years, all about various Unix topics. Though I was nobody, he was always polite, always patient, always willing to pass on knowledge. I'm quite grateful to him for taking the time to exchange ideas and polish them.

bwk is the same way. We were working on extending awk to be, well, different (we made awk scripts be part of awk, so any statement could be a script and it could pipe to another script). I talked bwk about the idea and asked if I could do on top of his awk and the next day a tarball showed up of ~bwk/awk, had the source, all the regressions, the source the awk book, everything.

I love these guys, they did a lot of things I admire.

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