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Dennis Ritchie, 1941-2011: Computer scientist, Unix co-creator, C programming language designer

Computer scientist Dennis Ritchie is reported to have died at his home this past weekend, after a long battle against an unspecified illness. No further details are available at the time of this blog post.

Wikipedia biography here.

He was the designer and original developer of the C programming language, and a central figure in the development of Unix. He spent much of his career at Bell Labs. He was awarded the Turing Award in 1983, and the National Medal of Technology in 1999.

"Ritchie's influence rivals Jobs's; it's just less visible," James Grimmelman observed on Twitter. "His pointer has been cast to void *; his process has terminated with exit code 0."

The news of Ritchie's death was first made public by way of Rob Pike's Google+.

mpatsis wrote:Πολύ κρίμα!
Πριν 2 3 μήνες διάβαζα το βιβλίο του για την C...

PASCAL wrote:

mpatsis wrote:Πολύ κρίμα!
Πριν 2 3 μήνες διάβαζα το βιβλίο του για την C...

Λίγο ζόρικο ε;

Zifnab wrote:RIP

PASCAL wrote:

mpatsis wrote:Πολύ κρίμα!
Πριν 2 3 μήνες διάβαζα το βιβλίο του για την C...

Λίγο ζόρικο ε;

Είναι βιβλίο αναφοράς - εκτός από την πολύ συγκροτημένη δομή του - δεν είναι βιβλίο τόσο φιλικό/φλύαρο προς το χρήστη..

AmmarkoV wrote:RIP

C for the win!

PASCAL wrote:Και μην ξεχνάμε ότι τα i-gadgets τρέχουν Objective...C

necrofear_13 wrote:

PASCAL wrote:Και μην ξεχνάμε ότι τα i-gadgets τρέχουν Objective...C

Objective is not C.

Objective-C is a thin layer on top of C, and moreover is a strict superset of C; it is possible to compile any C program with an Objective-C compiler, and to freely include C code within an Objective-C class.

Dennis Ritchie and Steve Jobs -- quite the juxtaposition


Today, it was narrowly reported that C programming language inventor and Unix co-creator Dennis Ritchie died after a long illness. He was 70. Earlier this month, Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs also died after a long illness.

It's quite the juxtaposition.

After witnessing the media fervor and outpouring of praise on social networks by tens of millions for Jobs, and nothing close to that for Ritchie, one name came to my mind: Nikola Tesla.

In case you didn't know, Tesla perfected the alternating current system (AC) that allows you to flip a switch and get light in your house. He also created a motor that could be run on AC, and that became the basis for all the other motors that are in the appliances in your house. Oh yeah, he also filed the first radio patent, not Marconi.

Tesla's inventions have been kind of a big deal for the past century or so, but they're things you just don't think about. It's kind of like a programming language on which most computers were built and an operating system that is used on servers and workstations to power worldwide commerce and the Internet. They're things we just take for granted, but we shouldn't.

Tesla worked as an assistant to Thomas Edison. Edison died rich and famous. Tesla died poor and mostly unknown. Jobs died a famous multi-billionaire. I can't say for sure how wealthy Ritchie was, but it's an easy assumption that he wasn't as wealthy as Jobs and he didn't garner a smidgen of the notoriety.

Neither Jobs nor Edison were highly, formally educated. Jobs dropped out of college after his first semester. Edison completed three years of primary education, not college.

Edison founded an industry based on electricity and Jobs arguably founded an industry based on the integrated circuit.

I did not know either Jobs or Ritchie. I never met either. I am just as guilty of knowing more about Steve Jobs than Dennis Ritchie; I'd only heard of Ritchie, I know Jobs' life story.

From all the reports I've read, Ritchie was a humble man. He was the winner of this nation's highest award for technology, the National Medal of Technology. He also received the Association for Computing Machinery's highly coveted Turing Award.

I think it is odd what passes for greatness these days -- wealth and fame. Perhaps they always have, but they shouldn't.

Recently, I read a pointed opinion piece by Neeraj Thakur titled: "Steve Jobs wasn't great, he wasn't even close." In it, Thakur builds the case that Jobs' contributions to the world cannot begin to compare to someone like Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine. He points out that Jobs shut down Apple's philanthropic activity in 1997 and never restarted it, even after his company stored up tens of billions of dollars in cash reserves.

Salk could have patented his invention and become immeasurably rich, but chose not to, stating: "Can anyone patent the sun?"

Conversely, I was incensed over a recent Forbes article praising Jobs for being a jerk because by treating people badly he was able to achieve what he did.

I would never attempt to take away anything from either Edison or Jobs. Both men were technological and business visionaries -- arguably geniuses -- who advanced the world of technology through their dogged perseverance and single-mindedness. But do they deserve the praises heaped on them or did they stand on the backs of greater inventors?

Oh, by the way, Apple's operating system is based on Unix.

Ημέρα Steve Jobs στην Καλιφόρνια

15/10/2011, 15:58


O Κυβερνήτης της Καλιφόρνια, Jerry Brown, ανακοίνωσε πως η 16η Οκτωβρίου θα είναι «Ημέρα Steve Jobs» για την πολιτεία, προσπαθώντας έτσι να αποδώσει φόρο τιμής στον ισχυρό άνδρα της Apple που έχασε την μάχη με την επάρατη νόσο πριν από μερικές ημέρες. Η συγκεκριμένη μέρα συμπίπτει με την εκδήλωση που θα κάνει η Apple στη μνήμη του ιδρυτή της, στα κεντρικά γραφεία στο Κουπερτίνο.

Η απόφαση του Brown έχει να κάνει με την αναγνώριση του Jobs και τη συμβολή του στο να γίνει η περιοχή του Silicon Valley το επίκεντρο του κόσμου της τεχνολογίας. Ταυτόχρονα, τα λουλούδια και τα συλλυπητήρια μηνύματα των φίλων της Apple συνεχίζουν να εμφανίζονται στα Apple Stores όλου του κόσμου. Εκτενές αφιέρωμα στη ζωή του Steve Jobs μπορείτε να βρείτε εδώ.
http://www.sport-fm.gr/article/508135

Spoiler: εμφάνιση/απόκρυψη

[img]http://www.neolaia.gr/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/bill_gates.jpg[/img]

Dennis Ritchie: the other man inside your iPhone

The groundbreaking work he did with Ken Thompson led to the operating system behind everything from set-top boxes to the iPhone, but who sings the praises of the late Dennis Ritchie?



It's funny how fickle fame can be. One week Steve Jobs dies and his death tops the news agendas in dozens of countries. Just over a week later, Dennis Ritchie dies and nobody – except for a few geeks – notices. And yet his work touched the lives of far more people than anything Steve Jobs ever did. In fact if you're reading this online then the chances are that the router which connects you to the internet is running a descendant of the software that Ritchie and his colleague Ken Thompson created in 1969.

The software in question is an operating system called Unix and the record of how it achieved its current unacknowledged dominance is one of the great untold stories of our time. It emerged from Bell Labs – the R&D facility of AT&T, the lightly regulated monopoly that ran the US telehone network for generations. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson were two ferociously bright Bell programmers who had been assigned to work with MIT on the design of an impossibly complex multi-user operating system called Multics. In the end, the plug was pulled on the project, with the result that Bell Labs found itself with two pissed-off hackers on its books. Ritchie and Thompson badly needed a new operating system to provide an environment for their own programming, had hoped that Multics would provide it and had greatly enjoyed working on the project. Back in the lab they decided that they would just have to build the operating system themselves. So in a fantastic burst of creativity (and without asking anyone's permission) they wrote Unics (as a counterpart to Multics). Inevitably the 'cs' became 'x' and Unix was born.

Thus did AT&T find itself the astonished proprietor of a uniquely powerful and innovative operating system. The problem was that it couldn't sell it, because under the Consent Decree that gave it the telephone monopoly AT&T was not allowed to be in the computer business. So the researchers in Bell Labs did what geeks do – they gave it away to their peers in university research labs, under a licence that permitted the recipients to modify and improve it. In doing this Ritchie and Thompson unwittingly launched the academic discipline of computer science, because university departments were suddenly able to give their students software that was not only powerful (and malleable) but also free. The result was that virtually every computer science student in the world became a Unix geek in the course of his or her education. Unix was to computer science what the Bible is to divinity students. The difference was that geeks were free to modify and improve their bible – which is what Bill Joy and his fellow students at Berkeley did when they created their own version of Unix, codenamed BSD (for Berkeley Software Distribution) – of which more in a moment.

In due course, AT&T escaped the shackles of the Consent Decree and started to assert proprietary rights over Unix. This spurred an MIT programmer named Richard Stallman to embark on a project to change the world. He founded the free software movement, invented a clever way of using copyright law to preserve the freedom of programmers to modify software, and embarked on the GNU project to create a functional clone of Unix that would be free of proprietary constraints. (GNU stands for "Gnu's not Unix" which is the kind of recursive joke only programmers enjoy.) Stallman, who is one of the great figures of our time, built most of the software tools needed for his great project, but before he could write the kernel of the operating system a Finnish hacker named Linus Torvalds did it – and released it in 1991 as Linux.

The rest, as they say, is history. Linux became one of the greatest collaborative ventures the world has seen (second only to Wikipedia), in which geographically dispersed programmers collaborate over the internet to debug, improve, extend and enhance a complex operating system that is not only remarkably stable and reliable but is also free. Because it's free and malleable, every manufacturer in the world who needs a stable and flexible operating system to run an electronic device tends to use Linux – which is how your TV's set-top box and your broadband router and maybe also your smartphone comes to be a Linux box. The same goes for the millions of PCs that make up Google's server farms. In that sense, we are all now Linux (and, by inference, Unix) users.

The neatest twist of all, however, involves Apple. OS X – the operating system that now powers every Apple product – is actually built on the Berkeley distribution of Unix, so if you hack into your iPhone what you'll find is BSD 4.2. You could say, therefore, that what Apple really did was to give Unix a pretty face. I've often wondered what Dennis Ritchie would have made of that. Now that he's gone, we'll never know. What we do know, though, is that we owe him more than we realised.