Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

Post by JoachimSchipper » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 2:18 PM UTC

rudiger wrote: post #166

ralfd wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by uriel » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 2:23 PM UTC

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…

Post by suivix » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 3:00 PM UTC

steveb wrote: post #25

There are several billion people using many billions of devices every day. From the code in your microwave to massive computing clusters, virtually all of our software can trace its ancestry back to this man's intellectual output. I'm eternally grateful for his life and contributions to humanity.

Post by berserkpi » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 3:23 PM UTC

Post by Swannie » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 4:38 PM UTC

m0nastic wrote: post #59

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!

In the realm of news, almost no one knows who Dennis Ritchie was. You can lament that fact (obviously, to anyone even remotely related to computing he was a figure of paramount importance), but it's ridiculous to expect the mainstream press to understand that importance. Analogies are tenuous, but when Michael Jackson died, it was obviously big news. It was all over television. Nobody reported when Ross Snyder‡ died,…