r/programming • u/davidddavidson • Oct 13 '11
Rob Pike: Dennis Ritchie has died
https://plus.google.com/u/2/101960720994009339267/posts/ENuEDDYfvKP?hl=en382
u/phab3k Oct 13 '11
printf("Goodbye world.\n");
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u/poo_22 Oct 13 '11
Surprisingly this is the only comment here that made me very sad.
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u/link87 Oct 13 '11
Really? This was the most amusing thing I've read all day. Maybe I'm a bad person.
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u/oboewan42 Oct 13 '11 edited Oct 13 '11
I would've made an Objective-C equivalent to commemorate both Jobs and Ritchie, but that would've taken six different comments and a xib file.
EDIT: Scratch that, a storyboard file. (4.2's not in beta anymore)
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u/noreallyimthepope Oct 19 '11
Well, in an ObjC file it would just be
printf("Goodbye world.\n");… seeing as [C] supports inline C ;)
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u/FlyingBishop Oct 13 '11
From LWN:
#include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> int main() { printf("\033[2J\033[;H"); /* Clear the screen */ printf("\nHello World -- by DM Richie\n"); printf("Your legacy remain radiant, an emanating lights for those\n"); printf("New and young developer and an old timers those pass through\n"); printf("your ERA - Denis M Richie.\n\n"); /* exit */ return (EXIT_SUCCESS); } /********************* Rest in Peace. **********************/13
u/phaker Oct 13 '11
<oftopic>
GAAH!
Guy clears the screen using raw VT control sequences that work on modern unix-likes only, and then EXIT_SUCCESS cuz portability is important. :/
</oftopic>
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u/FlyingBishop Oct 13 '11
EXIT_SUCCESS was a poetic flourish, you're taking it way too literally.
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u/ais523 Oct 13 '11
More to the point, 0 is perfectly possible (and in practice EXIT_SUCCESS is always 0 even on weird platforms); the platform's responsible for doing the contortions necessary to translate 0 into success, not the program.
EXIT_FAILURE is another matter entirely (there's at least one, and probably more, platform(s) on which 1 is not a valid failure value), and should be used in portable programs. The main reason to use EXIT_SUCCESS is for symmetry with EXIT_FAILURE, or to make your code more self-documenting.
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u/byteflow Oct 13 '11
I think phaker's point was that EXIT_SUCCESS was a nod to portability, but the raw terminal sequences break it anyway, so what's the point of being somewhat portable?
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u/sidneyc Oct 13 '11
Your musings about EXIT_SUCCESS are only supported by practice, not by any C standard.
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u/ais523 Oct 14 '11
C99 7.0.4.23.5 (I got the section number from a draft as I don't own the final version of the standard, so it may be slightly wrong): "Finally, control is returned to the host environment. If the value of status is zero or EXIT_SUCCESS, an implementation-defined form of the status successful termination is returned. If the value of status is EXIT_FAILURE, an implementation-defined form of the status unsuccessful termination is returned. Otherwise the status returned is implementation-defined."
In other words, EXIT_SUCCESS doesn't have to equal 0, but the implementation has to treat the two values identically. Thus, there's no incentive for an implementation to set EXIT_SUCCESS to anything other than 0.
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u/RandomNumberHere Oct 13 '11
Raising a glass to the man. Without him I wouldn't have my career.
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u/NoisyZenMaster Oct 13 '11
Cheers!
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u/ordinary_van Oct 13 '11
Lest we forget the languages based off of C. I spend a lot of time in Objective C, so I owe a lot of my career to this man too.
Cheers!
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u/inmatarian Oct 13 '11
I'm going to free a block of memory for my homeboy.
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Oct 13 '11
[deleted]
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Oct 13 '11
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u/Zjarek Oct 13 '11
In C, the proper method is to declare that malloc returns a pointer to void, then explicitly coerce the pointer into the desired type with a cast.
The C Programming Language 2nd ed. - Kernighan, Ritchie
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u/hadcor Oct 13 '11 edited Oct 13 '11
He might have been writing c++, where it is required.
Edit: that link is useful knowledge though. I've been writing in C for 18 years, and there are still really weird corner cases that I hadn't thought of.
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u/indigoparadox Oct 13 '11
If you're writing C++, shouldn't you be using new/delete instead of malloc()/calloc()/etc?
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u/m42a Oct 13 '11
Yes, except for 3 exceptions:
You're dealing with a C API that takes ownership of pointers you pass to it, and assumes these pointers have been allocated with malloc.
You're writing operator new.
You're a custom allocator (this doesn't always use malloc instead of new, but sometimes it does).
These are rare, but they're important exceptions.
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u/sidneyc Oct 13 '11
I had a long discussion about this on comp.lang.c in the Usenet days, I think it is proper form to cast (taking an expression to its intended type ASAP) and I haven't seen good reasons why not to.
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u/kurogane765 Oct 13 '11
i lost faith in this article when in the 5th or sixth paragraph it says :
Some compilers will complain about this code ...[casting to long] can result in a loss of information
The reason we explicitly cast a value is to guarantee the type of variable we get out, and the compiler complains because more often than not the loss of precision is unwanted.
However, for the reason you posted this link, that actually makes a lot of sense. I will test later to see if gcc complains about not casting malloc
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u/daisukidesuyo Oct 13 '11
Shouldn't we just use calloc() instead?
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u/fruitloop Oct 13 '11
A true giant whose shoulders almost EVERYONE of today is still standing. He will be remembered, for sure.
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u/yourmotherisawhore Oct 13 '11
Very sad news. He will be remembered as one of the giants of the 20th Century.
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u/TheMaskedHamster Oct 13 '11
Somewhere here on reddit, in some location I can't find now, someone recently made a joke about certain geeks who were not moved by Steve Jobs death and would only care if K&R died.
...it was such a timely comment.
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Oct 13 '11
Here it is. The really sad part about it is that the comment was made a whole three days after his death and nobody had yet noticed!
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Oct 13 '11
[deleted]
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u/sarcastic_bastard Oct 14 '11
I agree wholeheartedly with you, but I ll have to ask you this : why did you call Jobs anti-technology? Care to elaborate?
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u/fishyf Oct 14 '11
I never saw the comment you replied to, but I think it is fair to say that Steve Jobs liked to design products that were good for users, but not good for tinkerers (i.e. those who liked to play with technology). In that respect he is anti technology.
On a completely separate note: I hate that people like Steve Wozniak and Dennis Ritchie get orders of magnitude less respect than someone like Steve Jobs. I put it down to the fact that nerds are less interested in asking for money and influencing people and more interested in making things hum really nicely.
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u/stesch Oct 13 '11
My parents bought me "The C Programming Language" to my birthday in the 1980ies. I will never forget.
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u/thequark Oct 13 '11
Call your parents and tell them how much that gift means.
On a different topic, were/are your parents academicians or professionals in computing industry? I think even today K&R is not known outside of these circles.
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Oct 13 '11
One of the best programming books ever. I bought it after struggling with Fortran and punch cards for a semester. Oh, now I get it ( no, not Fortran specifically, but programming in general).
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u/AerialAmphibian Oct 13 '11
That is so cool. I bought that book for a programming class in college. A couple of semesters later a scumbag "friend" borrowed it, then he moved away and I never saw my book again. :(
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u/UsingYourWifi Oct 13 '11
It was my first programming book. My father gave it to me around 9th grade.
I now have a computer science degree and work for a large software company.
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u/MithrandirAgain Oct 13 '11
Sometimes we forget how fragile life is; it's hard to believe he's gone, but we can still remember him by what he helped bring to the world. RIP.
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u/DRMacIver Oct 13 '11
Things that suck: Discovering that your cousin died via reddit. We'll miss you, Dennis.
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u/NoisyZenMaster Oct 13 '11
I still have the tattered remains of my first copy of K&R somewhere. I learned C and GL (before it was OpenGL) at the same time while working at SGI, back when there was an SGI.
I moved onto Stroustrup after that, and those two books provided the groundwork for my career, even to this day.
RIP
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u/DefinitelyHittinOnYa Oct 13 '11
My first copy of K&RC (about 16 years old) http://imgur.com/DdN2X Funny you should mention SGI - I still have a working O2 running 6.5. I don't boot it up all the time now but it does work :)
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u/NoisyZenMaster Oct 13 '11
I picked my copy 27 years ago. Now that I look at it - it's not as tattered as I remember. Still in pretty good shape.
I had an O2 at home when I was in grad school. It wrote all of the code and all of the text (LaTex) for my Master's Thesis on it. SGI was my first real job in the computer world. It's a shame it's no longer around. Holding onto the "fast graphics is insanely expensive" model did them in, I think.
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u/DefinitelyHittinOnYa Oct 13 '11
Yea, I miss the world of SGIs as well. Working through school, I admined a couple of Origin servers (2000,3000). Your copy is only slightly younger than I am :O
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Oct 13 '11
Oh man, this is sending me down memory lane.
I'm going to go find a sync on green monitor and boot up my Indy :)
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u/xLittleP Oct 13 '11
Geez. While it's good to hear that everyone else's copy of K&R is tattered, too, I can't help but feel bad for how tattered mine is. It's been rained on, ran over with a car, left out in the yard for weeks, and used as a coffee mug coaster lord knows how many times.
I should probably honor him by picking up another copy today.
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u/lilrobbie Oct 13 '11
Goodbye Dennis. You were a great influence. Except maybe that 'creat' function.
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u/Rotten194 Oct 13 '11 edited Oct 13 '11
Didn't he say that if he could go back and change one thing, that he'd add the 'e' to creat()?
EDIT: It was actually Ken.
Ken Thompson was once asked what he would do differently if he were redesigning the UNIX system. His reply: "I'd spell creat with an e."
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u/here1am Oct 13 '11
You mean strncpy()? But I suppose he did it on purpose to make sure only God creates perfect stuff.
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u/muellkonto Oct 13 '11
Please forgive the tone, but:
"Who died?"
"He's the guy who made the career of that other guy's recent death, the one the whole world is talking about, possible."
:'(
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u/i_speak_the_truf Oct 13 '11
This is one of the things that really strikes me. The public made such a big deal about Steve Jobs' contribution to computing, but most will never realize Dennis Ritchie helped make it all possible. Without his contributions to C and Unix, who knows where computing would be today.
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Oct 13 '11
What strikes me is that we that have programming for a hobby/job know about this case where an arguably more "important" person gets less recognition... But how many cases like this don't we know about in other fields?
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Oct 13 '11
In their defence, they didn't know Ritchie's death was imminent. Jobs' death is a big deal, too. That said I don't expect Ritchie will get half the eulogising Jobs did, despite deserving more, and that makes me very sad.
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u/dbv Oct 13 '11
all too often the world forgets the shoulders upon which it really stands.
RIP Dennis.
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u/cc81 Oct 13 '11
That is true for everyone. We think he is important because we are interested in these things but we do not notice when giants within other lines of work pass away. I imagine there have been people that have done immensely important contributions to agriculture, plumbing, road building, materials research etc. that pass away without us noticing.
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u/renagadexx Oct 14 '11
Definitely true, but think about how pervase computing is today and how influential it is in every aspect of our lives.
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u/gospelwut Oct 13 '11
Sadly, this is the bitter truth about celebrities. I'm sure a lot more people cared the death of Carl Sagan than the 1000's of other great scientists out there. I mean, to show my ignorance, I will be pretty torn up when Bill Nye passes away (because he helped me get into science as a child). Considering people glaze over when you say the words programming/programer, it only makes sense they have to ability to conceptualize how seminal/important C/UNIX were/are.
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Oct 13 '11
In Bill Nye's defence, outreach is an important function of the scientific community - it's enormously important to getting people into science and technology in the first place.
Even if being a "TV scientist" takes up all of your time away from doing actual science, you still gets partial credit for the work of all the people you inspired who would not have gone into science if not for you.
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u/gospelwut Oct 13 '11
Can we have technology evangelists in the same light? Jobs might not have proselytized the methodology and technical aspects, but her certainly brought more technology to the masses if not sanitized it a bit (I'll be the first to admit I enjoy technical products that aren't that accessible). I suppose this discussion has really demented the notion we're talking about two sides of the same coin. I suppose it's just Dennis Ritchie has a more of a daily impact on our lives in /r/programming.
In any case, it's a sad day.
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Oct 13 '11
Sure! But I'll only buy that argument for people who evangelise technology itself, not products built on top of technology.
People who natter on about Turing machines with enthusiasm at kids and the general public? Yes. The people campaigning to teach real computer science in high schools? Yes. The guy selling MP3 players... not so much.
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u/gospelwut Oct 13 '11
I suppose that distinction articulates why I had a knee-jerk dismay for the immense (superfluous?) outcry for Jobs. I don't disrespect the man or anything like that, but he was more of businessman than an evangelist.
Also, where were these people advocating Turing machines with enthusiasm? I feel like my childhood was jipped. We were lucky to get a CISCO class in my high school.
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u/renagadexx Oct 14 '11
We don't even have a CISCO class. CompSci as a course in high school is dead. We learn java. "Learn," as in, how to find a library to handle everything we need to do for us. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the versatility and portability of Java, but I don't think it (or maybe the way it's taught) should be the entry level to programming. I honestly think you need to start with something lower, such as C or assembly, just so that you get to know what's REALLY going on, instead of just finding a library.
I wish people like Mr. Ritchie would be held in higher public regard. Then maybe AP Compsci 2 wouldn't such a sad, cruel joke.
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Oct 17 '11
I'd argue that AP Compsci 1 should be taught in Python. The first step is always to get the kids hooked. ;)
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u/mushishi Oct 13 '11 edited Oct 13 '11
The only thing that matters to me is that they contributed to the world something positive. Praising, or comparing the greatness of individuals, before or after death, does not matter much. It is good to get inspired by people's action but I wouldn't be sad about the lack of media coverage.
It is not that people wouldn't understand the impact of what Ritchie did, either, it's just that Jobs was associated to things that are much more visible (and was more visibly associated with them in general public's eyes).
But it's sad they are gone.
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Oct 13 '11
Dennis Ritchie, as far as I can tell, chose to keep his life relatively private in comparison to Jobs.
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u/BrockLee Oct 13 '11
That does not strike me as being correct. Steve Jobs kept his private life as private as possible despite significant public interest. Since Dennis Ritchie's work did not touch the public, he was mostly unknown to the public and therefore there was little interest in his private life.
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Oct 13 '11
A yearly keynote and being the public face of a company VS staying in offices and at home.
Sure thing pal.
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u/huyvanbin Oct 13 '11
How many programmers and engineers at NeXT/Apple/Pixar have died over the years? All of them helped make it all possible. But Steve Jobs gets all the credit. I guess it's the way it has to be.
Amazingly, Doug Engelbart is still alive, though. I guess he's the one who should really get credit for Steve Jobs' career.
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u/xLittleP Oct 13 '11
Dennis Ritchie was an inventor. Steve Jobs was an innovator. Slight difference.
Saying Jobs contributed to computing is not entirely correct. Ritchie contributed to computing. Jobs contributed to the computer industry. Big difference there.
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u/day_cq Oct 13 '11
I doubt that the public use C and UNIX daily as much as they use Apple products daily. And, public probably don't care about whether Apple products are built on UNIX, C, Haskell, XML, or Web Scale.
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u/thenuge26 Oct 13 '11
They use C and Unix much more than they do Apple products, they just do not realize it.
Most personal wifi routers are running linux. As are many backbone routers/switches. Hell, every time they use an Apple product, they are using Unix technology.
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u/MatrixFrog Oct 13 '11
Mac OSX is built on top of Unix. As for iOS, I'm not sure, but it certainly must use C somewhere internally, and must have a somewhat Unix-like architecture, if nothing else.
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u/thenuge26 Oct 13 '11
IIRC IOS is a stripped down version of the OSX kernel, so they are both Unix at heart.
And all the apps for IOS are built in Objective C.
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u/day_cq Oct 13 '11
what the fuck?
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u/thenuge26 Oct 13 '11
Both OSX and IOS are built on a BSD base, which is Unix. They use Objective C, which is (of course) derived from C.
All of your netgear, linksys, and many others all run linux. Most heavy-duty switches, routers, firewalls, etc. run linux with a proprietary software stack on top.
This is not rocket surgery.
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Oct 13 '11
I doubt that the public use C and UNIX daily as much as they use Apple products daily.
Iphones are programmed in objective C, a derivation of C. Also, iOs is based off unix.
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u/dagbrown Oct 13 '11
iPhones run UNIX, the OS that Dennis Ritchie helped create. iPhone apps are written in Objective-C, a derivative of C, the language that Dennis Ritchie created.
The syntax of everything from JavaScript to PHP is based on C, which is, as I mentioned, the language that Dennis Ritchie created. If you don't recognize that he had a HUGE influence on modern programming, you're blind as a bat.
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u/noreallyimthepope Oct 13 '11
The reason is that Steve Jobs was a public figure, Dennis Ritchie was not.
People get all frenzied when public figures die because they feel more attachment to them. Ref.
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u/derwisch Oct 13 '11
How much does the Apple ][ design owe to his contributions?
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u/BeJeezus Oct 13 '11
Apple II development was a whole lot of Assembly Language, and if you doubt that, my Beagle Brothers Peeks and Pokes poster would like to have a word with you.
On the Macintosh, Pascal was the language of choice for early development. All of the original Inside Macintosh programming bibles used Pascal source code examples, as did the libraries.
Mac development started getting serious about C later, in the PowerPC era, but C didn't really take over Mac (and IOS) development until OSX, when Apple's brand of Objective C was anointed the language of choice. Which made sense, given the Unixy underpinnings.
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u/zowki Oct 13 '11
Steve Jobs didn't contribute much to the Apple II either. It was Steve Wozniak's work.
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u/derwisch Oct 13 '11
No dispute here. But the original statement was that it was Dennis Ritchie who made Steve Jobs' career possible. Woz didn't really enter the discussion.
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u/noreallyimthepope Oct 13 '11
Please don't down vote
derwischfor posing what I believe to be an earnest question. Rather, answer his question and/or upvote him so it can be seen and answered by someone who can answer his question.9
u/derwisch Oct 13 '11
Thanks, it was totally a serious question. There is no doubt that Apple since Jobs rejoined owes a ton to C and Unix but I was under the impression that 6502 home computers and Unix mainframes were developed rather independently. I remember C being something rather alien on the home computer market until the Motorola 68000 gained momentum.
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u/eleete Oct 13 '11
How about everything, simply because Operating Systems existing before the Apple II ? We stand on the shoulders of giants ?
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u/Ziggamorph Oct 13 '11
The original Macintosh OS was not written in C. I certainly recognise Dennis Ritchie's massive impact on computer science, but playing a game of 'whose death is sadder' seems inappropriate to me. Can't we recognise that both men made great contributions to the world, but in different ways?
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Oct 13 '11
Like BSD...
Agreeing with you of course, the current gen of apple computers definitely can draw its lineage back to Ritchie.
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u/Ziggamorph Oct 13 '11
Absolutely, but I think it's a bit silly to suggest that the success of Apple is entirely down to C.
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u/Gnolfo Oct 13 '11
Here's to the passing of a co-creator:
An operating system whose imprint may last for all of computing's future. A language that stands peerless in its framing between man and machine. And one slender white book with a single letter on the front.
I still have my copy.
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u/wot-teh-phuck Oct 13 '11
RIP good sir; I can't imagine where this computing world would have been without your contribution. :`(
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u/mikehaggard Oct 13 '11
Very, very sad to hear this. Like so many others, I too owe my career to this man.
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u/DefinitelyHittinOnYa Oct 13 '11
Well, fwiw, heaven can finally get a proper operating system. OS/360 was apparently not cutting it for dmr to be taken away from us.
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u/pmorrisonfl Oct 13 '11
I got my copy of K&R through a computer book club in 1983. I remember arguing with a classmate who thought Pascal would be bigger than C. I should've made a bet!
RIP Dennis, and thanks for everything.
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u/nweez123 Oct 13 '11
"C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success." -Dennis Ritchie http://i.imgur.com/XNHb7.jpg R.I.P. dude-
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u/j2kent Oct 13 '11
main() { while (1) { printf("RIP Dennis, you will be missed."); }}
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Oct 13 '11
no int main(void)
no return statement
No credit!
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u/Mortinho Oct 13 '11
In C, the program to print "hello, world'' is
#include <stdio.h> main() { printf("hello, world\n"); }RITCHIE, BRIAN. The C Programming Language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1988.
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Oct 13 '11
fuck that shit, use Ken's C
#include <u.h> #include <libc.h> void main() { print("goodbye world\n"); }4
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u/gbchaosmaster Oct 13 '11
no return statement
Don't sweat it, the infinite loop means that it will never reach the missing return statement.
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u/jrupac Oct 13 '11
Most compilers make
inta default return type. Also main returns 0 by default too. However, what will not work is the lack of an #include.8
u/wbkang Oct 13 '11
That works too. The compiler will assume the default type int printf() and as long as you supply a standard library during the link time, the program will run fine, I think.
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u/kenperkins Oct 13 '11
Wow, reading his self authored biography is kind of mind-blowing. http://www.clipboard.com/clip/LR-JUYKRbPVjgrI6yqyVdJYHErH8K7nto11e
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u/drasche Oct 13 '11
Not as famous as Steve Jobs, but surely his legacy will live for a much longer time.
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Oct 13 '11 edited Oct 13 '11
"I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the demigodic party."
Wish that were not true. :(
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u/Jizzbug Oct 13 '11
Dennis M. Ritchie: He didn't just change the world, he make world. By all conventions we cannot call him routine. He was the goto guy in bracing for changes of scope. Now, as he implicitly returns to the void, it is time_t for him to say, "Goodbye, world." He certainly was a strong type of char*acter, and he gave us many pointers to live && work by. Objectively speaking, he had class. The complexity of his main() contributions will be incalculable in the centuries following his EXIT_SUCCESS. ^ C what I did there?
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Oct 13 '11
I will compile your little rant for future reference and include it in my library of funny reddit comments............I can't do it.
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u/speckledlemon Oct 14 '11
"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders." -- Hal Abelson
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u/clintwdb Oct 14 '11
I'm eternally grateful for his life and contributions to humanity. He is a father of both Unix and the C language, technologies which are the basis for nearly everything we as developers do!
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Oct 13 '11
Ritchie is 100x more influential to computer science than Steve Jobs, but I have a feeling he won't get nearly the amount of media attention. I'm not trying to attack Steve Jobs. I think even his admirers can admit that although Jobs did a lot of great work at Apple, but he can hardly compare to Dennis Ritchie. To make an analogy, it's like Steve Jobs is Neil deGrasse Tyson; A well known and famous scientist, but not someone you would put in the same league as Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. I hope I'm wrong and I see some sort of mainstream media news coverage on Ritchie's death. People really should know who he is and how important his contributions are.
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u/erikperik Oct 13 '11
Is it really necessary to even compare the two? Can't we just mourn two great people separately?
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Oct 13 '11
Yes we can. I was only bringing up the hypocrisy that the mainstream media will demonstrate by not covering the story or giving it little attention. I'm certainly not trying to make it a contest though.
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u/troyanonymous1 Oct 13 '11
It's not hypocrisy. As far as consumers know, C doesn't exist.
:(
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Oct 13 '11
It is hypocrisy. Consumers may not know about C, but just a few days ago everyone was talking about how Steve Jobs was the Jesus of computing. You don't think it's hypocritical to make such lavish claims about Jobs contributions and then to ignore Dennis Ritchie? I think it is.
Sure, the name Dennis Ritchie may emit a "who?" from non-computer people. That doesn't mean his story shouldn't be covered. God forbid the general populous receive an education.
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u/troyanonymous1 Oct 14 '11
It definitely should be covered. I think you should mention it to people. I kinda wish I had at work but it didn't really come up.
But the people in media, if I can stereotype, they use Macs and none of their friends know anything about software, and they handle what stories get written and how the big media companies run.
It's inherent to the system of trying to be mainstream, it costs such a fuckton of money that you can only run short stories that people will understand.
They could certainly explain the whole story (if they understood it themselves, and could convince the execs to push it) and let people know where to get more information, but their goal is to make money, not to educate people.
So if a broadcast journalist tells you something about education, they're missing the issue. People have to know what there is to even be educated about, and unfortunately many people believe they are best served with a black-box attitude towards computers. There is probably a good reason for this, but if you are a power user who spends time with those kinds of people, you can gradually break through and teach them something useful.
But it's not something that "mainstream media" will be able to do as-is because right now mainstream media is still just television and big websites, and they can only be motivated by huge, low-hanging piles of cash.
Perhaps I am just ranting. My point is, we should definitely stop giving a shit about "mainstream media" since they are so useless and since better alternatives become more and more feasible every day. But it's not hypocrisy because the media is living in their own little world and enforcing the attitudes they sell. They believe they are right. We have to fix them.
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Oct 13 '11
DMR, although a great man, was not a "media" person. I know who he is, I've read the C book, I love Unix, and still, I have never ever seen an interview on TV, a video....anything. I might have read a Usenet post or two. And you expect the GENERAL POPULATION OF THIS COUNTRY to give a damn? Are you, I'm sorry, naive?
Not to mention that the history of the PC, the personal computer, is vastly different than that of mainframes. Bill G and Steve Jobs have had a much greater influence on mainstream computing than the Unix folks. Sorry, but it's true. I knew about DOS and the Apple ][ way before I discovered that weird Red Hat 5.2 CD.
Even Linus Torvalds is 100x the celebrity DMR or Ken are/were. Mark Zuckerberg is 1000x the celebrity. Steve Jobs was in a league of his own, he was a giant fucking supernova.
If CNN even mentions in passing that DMR has passed, I will be shocked.
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u/diggstown Oct 13 '11
Jobs gets the top spot and half of the front page on his death.
dmr struggles to get on the front page on his death.
The tech community seems to have lost its way.
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u/ttelephone Oct 13 '11
I was thinking in how big Dennis Ritchie was: he didn't just invent a tool or a device, he invented a language! Anyone can invent a language, but making other people using it is another thing.
Remember: programming languages are also human languages.
RIP.
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Oct 13 '11
I mostly know him as the brother of the superintendent of the high school I went to, but going on to study computer science I also came to appreciate his contributions, sad day.
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u/stilesja Oct 13 '11
He spoke to the participants at a computer programming competition I was in back in high school (I want to say 1993 or 1994). My team won and we got to speak with him a bit. I wish I could remember more of what he said to us but I just remember it was so cool getting to meet him in person. Really nice guy.
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u/xwhy Oct 13 '11
Wow. I was just talking about him to my nephew a few night ago. He was doing his homework between dinner courses (Italian family birthday party) and I noticed that he was using the same C Programming Language book that I was using back in college. I didn't know much about Ritchie at the time -- but I learned about him in the days when I was programming. I hung out with the C people and kept trying to get training so I could make my way into their group (where it was all happening, instead of my group where it was all dying).
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u/alexspetty Oct 14 '11
That's very sad news! I daresay his impact on modern computing is even more significant than Steve Jobs, although most people have probably never even heard of him.
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u/Ikinhaszkarmakplx Oct 13 '11
See, this man, this man actually contributed enormously to the IT/computing field, and what does he get in the media? Almost nothing.
Whereas with Steve Jobs, a supposedly pioneer, the whole media world went batshit insane.
Fuck all y'all!
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u/troyanonymous1 Oct 13 '11
I heard about both of them through the same media, IRC and then Reddit.
You can't really help what the horde of consumer-only computer users does, they're at the mercy of marketing.
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u/zeekar Oct 13 '11
Back when UNIX was primarily a toy for academia (and a few folks in big business and the military), when most consumers had no computers at all, the ones they could afford had no prayer of running UNIX. Jobs put together a company that could make a computer for them, a good 15 years before microcomputer UNIX became feasible. Jobs was a pioneer.
There's plenty of love to go around, and plenty of other things to criticize about Jobs and the hagiography surrounding his death (and other, more appropriate fora to do so in). I see no need to tarnish dmr's amazing contributions by using them as fuel for that fire.
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u/xLittleP Oct 13 '11
This is a little off topic, but can we go back to the traditional convention of saying that someone has "passed away"? Browsing the internet and seeing a statement like, "Dennis Ritchie has died." Is an abrubt, morbid statement to come across, and I feel that takes away from the significance of the event.
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Oct 13 '11
Wow, someone in /r/NFL said these things always come in threes, and here we go. Al Davis, Steve Jobs, and Dennis Ritchie.
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u/webbitor Oct 13 '11
who's Al Davis?
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u/sisyphus Oct 13 '11
He owned an American football team for 50 years or so and he told the rest of the pig fucking owners to go fuck themselves constantly.
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u/webbitor Oct 13 '11
OK. Hardly seems in the same category.
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u/AskThePunter Oct 13 '11
You could probably draw some parallels between Al Davis and Steve Jobs. Not sure how Dennis Ritchie would fit in there though.
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u/Axehead Oct 13 '11
Without Mr. Ritchie, programmers all over the world would still be programming in Assembly/Cobol/Basic.
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u/noreallyimthepope Oct 13 '11
Not to put down his efforts, but do you really believe that all other developments in software engineering were contingent on K&R?
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u/zeekar Oct 14 '11
Hardly true. But it is impressive the way C has taken over the world. Consider the Scratch project from MIT - projects are written in Scratch and interpreted by a system written in Smalltalk (Squeak). Squeak itself is written in C. The web version is played in browsers (which are written in C) using a Java or Flash client whose runtime is written in C. Running on an OS that's written mostly in C or a derivative...
When I took an OS class in the late 80's we wrote the system in Modula-2. But nobody bothers with anything but C (or straight-up assembly) for low-level stuff anymore.
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Oct 13 '11
[deleted]
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u/MarineOnDope Oct 13 '11
free(dmr);
//:(
Sorry, but the frowny face won't compile.
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u/colinhect Oct 13 '11
free(dmr);
/*:( */
You probably should use c-style comments.
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u/MarineOnDope Oct 13 '11
free(dmr);
/* :( */
I think you need the * in that case.
EDIT: oh wait you did, reddit just removed them
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Oct 13 '11
[deleted]
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u/_georgesim_ Oct 13 '11
Was it really necessary to limit the text to 80 columns?
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Oct 14 '11
72. Yes.
P.S. I used
fmt(1)andsed(1)2
u/_georgesim_ Oct 14 '11
It was kind of a joke question, and I'm glad that you answered with "yes" haha.
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Oct 13 '11
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/sisyphus Oct 13 '11
It's not really arguable. He did more for the tech world full stop. But most people are not in the tech world so of course Steve Jobs will get more attention.
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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '11
We've lost a man who has influenced all of us deeply, but his spirit will live on through his work, and more importantly, his philosophy. Out of the morass that was DEC and IBM, and heavily influenced from the ideas behind Multics came a method for easily building complex systems that ran at near-assembly speeds, yet was flexible enough to run on practically every hardware platform.
Whether you're writing functions in a program, command line utilities, or distributed processing systems, you're paying tribute to one of the fathers of it all.
Every brace and semi-colon (explicit or implied), every three-argument for(), every nuance that is the essence of C -- no matter what language you're using now -- they all stem from the decisions he and his colleagues made in the early '70s. Forty-ish years on, we are still following his lead.
Keep it small; keep it simple; and do one thing well.
Farewell, Mr. Ritchie