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Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

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Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#181

Post by bgurupra »

suivix wrote: post #175
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.

My question is if he didn't create a language like C, would someone else have? Was it such a leap from existing languages?

The same thing can be said for pretty much every invention/innovation ever made even if it was a huge leap from the prior art - but then he was the one who did it and I guess that is what matters at the end

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#182

Post by vsrinivas »

msl wrote: post #111
nikcub wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is a sure-fire way to distinguish between developers who learnt to code a while ago from K&R and those who didn't. I can't stand looking at braces on new lines. It is all from back when a new line was something to be treasured as displays were bad.

Actually, my copy of the second edition K&R seems to have the opening brackets on new lines when it comes to function declarations, so: main () { but: while (){ and: if(){ I don't have a copy of the first edition at hand but I seem to remember that it uses this same style. //msl

The first edition has opening brackets for functions on a new line. It also used a space before parenthesis for while loops and conditionals. Return types, when required, were on the same line as a function name.

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#183

Post by bgurupra »

bch wrote: post #66
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.

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.

In a way I owe my job @ IBM which I got right out of college to that book.Of the many many C books at that time , K&R was obviously the one that was head and shoulders above the rest in terms of explaining C and how to write C programs in a very lucid/concise/Beautiful way and the guys interviewing me were particularly impressed that I almost had memorized K&R and gave me the job which I have to this day

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#184

Post by m0nastic »

Swannie wrote: post #179
m0nastic wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Regard Ross Snyder, I distinctly recall a televised report about it on BBC News.

Yay, that helps reinforce my misguided American belief that the BBC is still a quality news organization!

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#185

Post by OctaneOps »

RIP. His life exemplifies:

“Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something, or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing. Sharing Knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes.”- Peter Senge

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#186

Post by tomjen3 »

strait wrote: post #89
melling wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And he would have been if social conservatives hadn't destroyed him.

god damn I fucking hate them.

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#188

Post by cbr »

tomjen3 wrote: post #186
strait wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alan Turing would be 99 if he were alive today.

And he would have been if social conservatives hadn't destroyed him. god damn I fucking hate them.

He probably would have lived longer, but living to 99 is pretty rare.

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#189

Post by burgerbrain »

nitrogen wrote: post #103
barrkel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

alnayyir, you've been hellbanned. In case you didn't know.

That must've been one seriously downvoted comment to get someone with over 2000 karma to a -2 average.

It was a series of comments I believe, in which he began taunting the people downvoting him to downvote him more.

Re: Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died

#190

Post by fjarlq »

joeyh wrote: post #176
fjarlq wrote: post #72

:( Thank you, Dennis. dmr posted to Usenet quite often over the years: http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?user=research!dmr http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?user=dmr@research.UU... http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?user=dmr@alice.UUCP http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?user=dmr@research.at... http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?user=dmr@bell-labs.c...

"Sorry, we could not find any information on research!dmr." -- google Well then, here are some of his first usenet posts: http://olduse.net/blog/Dennis_Ritchie/ The one on dsw is especially good. SYNOPSIS (put number in console switches) dsw core

Hit reload a few times and it'll come up. Google Groups has been flaky for a while now.
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