printf("goodbye, Dennis");

He was the real deal, very quiet, very passionate about what he did, he wrote, both in code and in papers, in a terse way that just got to the point.

If you have not gotten copies of the Bell Labs Technical Journals that have all the Unix papers in them, you are in for a treat. Get them. Read them. They wrote about what they did and wrote well. If all of us wrote that well the world would be a better place. I've tried. It's not easy.

When you read those you'll grow to like Brian and Ken as well. There is a lot of good there, I wouldn't hire anyone who had not read that stuff.

Bell Labs ought to be getting some loving here and we ought to be trying to bring something like that back. It was home for Dennis and Brian and Ken and Unix.

  #include 
  int main(int c, char **v) {
    printf("Hello\nJello");
    while(1) ;
    return 0;
  }

Early in my career I was lucky to use Unix System V. I found those voluminous unix manuals so natural. I could find anything came to my mind less than a minute. Unix system was so coherent, so intuitive. I still enjoy unix prompt, shell to this day.

His book "The C Programming Language" has been the best language book I have ever read. So succinct, but so rewarding for those who studied diligently. Such a beautiful book. I always took that thin book as a standard to compare all the technical books I encountered. If it is that fat I thought there must be something wrong with either the book or the subject of it.

In a broader context:

There was this article recently about Steve Jobs. In that it said somewhere around 90 billion passed through this life and only a few could be able to find his/her voice. Many died before his full potential could even be recognized by themselves. I wonder what would world look like if those could fulfill their talent to their maturity. Because not all societies of the past allowed such liberty for many.

The Economists shields its authors from scrutiny and lends its credibility to who knows who. How do I know if the writer of an article criticizing one industry doesn't have interests in its rival? Or is a person of one political party criticizing a political opponent? Is it "The Economist" criticizing the Democratic Party in this article or is it penned by the hand of Karl Rove?

Second and most importantly, like I said, even if you agree with free markets, it is one thing to agree with them. It is another thing to close yourself off from alternatives.

The truth is key. Remaining objective is key. If there is evidence of the free markets working, by all means report it. But don't glorify it. And if there is evidence of free markets failing, report that, too. Don't hide it. Don't apologize for it. Report the truth. Journalism isn't about believing in something. It's about reporting what happens. The Economist is about believing in free markets. Therefore it is bad journalism, but it is good propaganda. If The Economist was about objectively reporting on politics and economics and just happened to have positive articles about free markets because there really is positive evidence to report, I would forgive it. But that isn't the case, so I can't.

EDIT: I realize people are misinterpreting my criticism to be about The Economist's ideology. It is not. My criticism is that it has an ideology. That's propaganda not journalism by most commonly understood definitions of propaganda and journalism.

Would they program Windows in Pascal?