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Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

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Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#161

Post by brown9-2 »

SoupIce wrote: post #123
HardyLeung wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not compare the two legends. They made their own marks in vastly different ways. Both magnificent. I love them both. RIP.

Lets compare HNs reaction over them two. Steve Jobs: Two days full frontpage of crying and "I remember him like this like that" and "wish I could have had the time to suck his penis" Dennis m Ritchie: One post, most comments discussing relation of news to Steve Jobs. Great going HN.

Just for the historical record, at 8:00am EST there are 12 stories on the front page about Ritchie's passing.

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#162

Post by chuinard »

BasDirks wrote: post #112
sid0 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't litter the frontpage posts on our heroes Speak for yourself. Steve Jobs was not my hero. I respected him but did not like him one bit.

Our heroes = Your hero (Richie) + my heroes (Richie, Steven)

I usually spell a hero's name right.

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#164

Post by happypeter »

chugger wrote: post #82
keidian wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Great ideas in great work, great people never die.

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#166

Post by rudiger »

ralfd wrote: post #154
bodyfour wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It's hard to even really comprehend how deep his influence goes; we're so surrounded by it's hard to even see it sometimes. Consider that every single person reading these words are doing so using technology he created -- after all, even if you're not on a UNIX derivative you're probably on an OS and web browser written in C. How much code is written every day in C and its descendants? How much more in langu…

Well, I don't know… I feel that as soon as I mention Pascal or BASIC I am downvoted to oblivion. The original Macintosh was programmed in assembler. As was MS-DOS and Windows up to version 3.1 (perhaps even in important parts in Win95?). The big boom of computing and the GUI had already happened. In the late 80s Turbo Pascal was really popular: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(programming_language) http://en.wiki…

Regarding your last point, while the ideas of Smalltalk and especially Lisp are influential, C may have just as much a claim to influence. Both Lisp and C are beautiful abstractions, the assembly languages of two abstract machines. While Lisp is powerful, C is such a profound success because the C abstract machine is very close to how computers actually work.

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#167

Post by brudgers »

kalid wrote: post #120
bch wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only is K&R _the_ book for C, it's an example for engaging, lucid, just-right technical writing that any technical manual should strive for.

That book is a reminder of a time when Wrox & friends weren't trying to crank out 5 lb tomes on .NET SOAP Interoperability. So many modern books read like a student trying to pad out a page count for a professor.

I agree, K&R is a landmark.

Then again, so is AoCP.

Wrox is skinning a different cat by trying to provide the FM which no longer comes in the box.

Ritchie knew how to provide just enough back in the days when just enough covered the vast majority of cases.

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#168

Post by sharmajai »

C, like thousands of other computer science students, was the first language I learnt.

I have always felt that a language is only as popular as the niche it serves. For C that niche started out as OS implementation and expanded into driver programming, UI programming, embedded systems programming, graphics programming, and many many more disciplines.

There was Fortran and PL/1 before C, what made C so popular? I will let dmr's friend Brian Kernighan answer it:

C is perhaps the best balance of expressiveness and efficiency that has ever been seen in programming languages. At the time it was developed, efficiency mattered a great deal: machines were slow and had small memories, so one had to get close to the efficiency of assembler. C did this for system programming tasks--writing compilers, operating systems and tools. It was so close to the machine that you could see what the code would be (and it wasn't hard to write a good compiler), but it still was safely above the instruction level and a good enough match to all machines that one didn't think about specific tricks for specific machines. Once C came along, there no longer was any reason for any normal programmer to use assembly language. It's still my favorite language; if I were marooned on a desert island with only one compiler, it would have to be for C.[1]

If I have to pick one reason for C's popularity, it would be pointers (both function and data) alongwith type casting. IMHO this was the combination that not only gave you full control of the underlying hardware (other languages had done that too) but most importantly it enabled other programming paradigms, (functional, object oriented etc.), while doing that.

Thanks for introducing us to the wonderful world of computer programming. RIP DMR.

1. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7035

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#169

Post by [deleted] »

brown9-2 wrote: post #161
SoupIce wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets compare HNs reaction over them two. Steve Jobs: Two days full frontpage of crying and "I remember him like this like that" and "wish I could have had the time to suck his penis" Dennis m Ritchie: One post, most comments discussing relation of news to Steve Jobs. Great going HN.

Just for the historical record, at 8:00am EST there are 12 stories on the front page about Ritchie's passing.

[deleted]

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#170

Post by bch »

davidw wrote: post #137
kalid wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That book is a reminder of a time when Wrox & friends weren't trying to crank out 5 lb tomes on .NET SOAP Interoperability. So many modern books read like a student trying to pad out a page count for a professor.

I wonder what will happen to books like this, as these guys pass away. For instance, I don't see updated versions of Stevens' books, which are classics in their own right with regards to network and systems programming on Unix. I learned a ton of things from those, and wow, they're sure beautiful books.

Hey @davidw.

We can hope that they might receive similar treatment as John Ousterhout's "Tcl and the Tk Toolkit" did. JOs work (including TatTT) is often held up as excellent writing as well. The second ed. of that book was updated by a group of experts w/ JOs blessing, but w/o his participation if I understand correctly. Indeed @davidw was a contributor to that project ;) (thx. david.)

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