Sorry, I'm not a 20 something saying wow 70 is a long time, I'm closer to 50 than 40 so I can almost see 70. I was trying to provide some perspective on 70 not being old. It should still be a very productive time in peoples lives, and it's still way too young to die.
Turing's destruction is more complicated than just prosecution by conservatives. He had access to extremely secure information over a period of years, this is what drew attention to his homosexuality.
When someone gets a security clearance, what do you think is looked for? Not many spies or people who eventually divulge information to an enemy country have explicit ties, eg. they aren't a member of a communist party. What is investigated are characteristics that would make a person likely to be influenced: debts, addictions, gambling problems or, as in Turing's case, some sort of socially unaccepted lifestyle.
Around the time of Turing's conviction, several other homosexuals had been convinced by the soviets to become double agents, eg. Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess. Turing also made regular trips to the continent to pursue sexual relationships. This is what inspired the indecency charges. That's my understanding at least.
Please understand, what happened to Turing was terrible. No one deserves that fate. I really do wish he could have escaped somehow. That said I don't think the situation was as simple as social conservatives destroying people.
The reason they could blackmail those people was that those in charge had made homosexuality illegal. None these defections had to happen and nobody seems to think Turing was embaressed about his homosexuality, so if it is not illegal what would there be to blackmail him about?
And what happened wasn't terrible. Losing your best friend to cancer is terrible. Accidents are terrible. This was entirely done by monsters (they may be of the species homo sapiens but they aren't human) and it was a monstrous crime.
Edit: sorry, that is the last time I will write hn comments from my phone
If you believe that every despicable act in that past was done by monsters then you will waste your time looking for monsters. Instead you should be looking for human beings, who always have justifications, they are the ones who will be doing the despicable acts of the future.
You absolute ignorance of the events you are ranting about does everyone a disservice.
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.
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.
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.)
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
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was an American computer scientist notable for developing C and for having influence on other programming languages, as well as operating systems such as Multics and Unix.
He received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology 1998 on April 21, 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007.
"C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."
- Dennis Ritchie, on The Development of the C Language[2]
I wonder how many people here got to know Ritchie through "The C Programming Language", I am sure half of us have it on our shelves.
It is amazing how many lives a single person can touch directly and indirectly.
I hope Ritchie passed away knowing the unforgettable contribution he made to the world as we all move forward on a platform he set down for us more than 30 years ago.
What an awesome legacy to leave behind. Thank you Dennis.
It still is. It's the first, foremost, and only recommendation we give for a C book on Freenode among the veterans.
K&R is how I initially learned of Ritchie, along with Unix and hacker lore.
This is a sad day for me personally. We're starting to the lose the original hackers.
We need to start thinking about biographies and archival options. I appreciate that dmr was a private man, but we need to start making more opportunities to interview these guys.
Zed Shaw's work might eventually supplant K&R as my choice for a tutorial for people new to C, but I'll always recommend it to people who really want to know their roots.
Although this makes his comments only viewable by comment-necrophiliacs like us and are unchallengeable by reply. It's like alnayyir is a zombie gadfly. Creepy.
Banned users are not informed of the ban. New comments are quietly autokilled. This particular user, iirc, was a frequent poster who was notable for their additions. Which I'm guessing is why they've been told.
Viewing comments with showdead on is good but it makes viewing the new page difficult when half the page is auto-banned links.
Actually when I read the post just now, I went to the shelf and picked up my copy of it and just placed it on my desk, he had a major impact on my life.
I "feel" more of a loss about Dennis' passing than Steve's.
I know what you mean, there is all that nostalgia of going through that book so many years ago and learning the programming constructs that would benefit all of us professionally for years to come.
Indeed. I was saddened by the dead of Steve Jobs. And although I comprehend his contribution to humanity, I was never "personally" touched by his products (e.g. I have never owned an Apple product).
Dennis Ritchie is a different thing. As other people have pointed, in my opinion there is no current technology that was not "touched" by the contributions that R&K did. Being it Unix or C, these are two of the most important software creations in history.
While I dabbled with the language before, The C Programming Language book was a true eye opener for me. Grokking it truly paved the way for my programming career.
His brother was superintendent while I was in high school. We asked him to invite dmr to come in and give a speech once, but understandingly dmr was too busy and had to decline. If dmr was anything like his brother, he was a great person and will be missed greatly. RIP, you changed the world for the better.
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.
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 languages that themselves are written in C?
dmr is part of an very small group of computer scientists that truly changed the paradigm of computing for everyone everywhere (Turing, von Neumann, Engelbart, ...) As long as there are ones and zeros his name will be remembered.
What would the world look like if C would have been never invented? I guess our browsers would simply be coded in Turbo Pascal dialect.
And Visual Basic is still huge (#12 on langpop.com). Also someone could reasonably argue that from the concept and ideas SmallTalk and Lisp were way more influential than C.
That said, I feel a bit dirty to make this argument. Dennis Ritchie should be praised for his accomplishments.
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.
Absolutely.
Half of the world uses Unix flavours be it linux or any other OS( Mac OSX) , most of the realtime critical apps run on unix.
Most of the primitive codes are written in C , first language most people learn is C(atleast for me).
With Unix and C , he has changed the way people think of computers and the way of talking to them.
Sums up my feelings too. dmr is a legendary computer scientist who in all fairness had more impact on the field of computer science, and programming than any one of us can even begin to fathom. True legend.
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
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.
213 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 289 ms ] threadMe? I was born around the time the Linux OS hatched and the internet is starting to open up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centenarian
With a bit more research, many people could live to be 90-100.
god damn I fucking hate them.
When someone gets a security clearance, what do you think is looked for? Not many spies or people who eventually divulge information to an enemy country have explicit ties, eg. they aren't a member of a communist party. What is investigated are characteristics that would make a person likely to be influenced: debts, addictions, gambling problems or, as in Turing's case, some sort of socially unaccepted lifestyle.
Around the time of Turing's conviction, several other homosexuals had been convinced by the soviets to become double agents, eg. Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess. Turing also made regular trips to the continent to pursue sexual relationships. This is what inspired the indecency charges. That's my understanding at least.
Please understand, what happened to Turing was terrible. No one deserves that fate. I really do wish he could have escaped somehow. That said I don't think the situation was as simple as social conservatives destroying people.
And what happened wasn't terrible. Losing your best friend to cancer is terrible. Accidents are terrible. This was entirely done by monsters (they may be of the species homo sapiens but they aren't human) and it was a monstrous crime.
Edit: sorry, that is the last time I will write hn comments from my phone
If you believe that every despicable act in that past was done by monsters then you will waste your time looking for monsters. Instead you should be looking for human beings, who always have justifications, they are the ones who will be doing the despicable acts of the future.
You absolute ignorance of the events you are ranting about does everyone a disservice.
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.
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.)
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.
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was an American computer scientist notable for developing C and for having influence on other programming languages, as well as operating systems such as Multics and Unix.
He received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology 1998 on April 21, 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007.
"C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."
- Dennis Ritchie, on The Development of the C Language[2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie
[2] http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html
It is amazing how many lives a single person can touch directly and indirectly.
I hope Ritchie passed away knowing the unforgettable contribution he made to the world as we all move forward on a platform he set down for us more than 30 years ago.
What an awesome legacy to leave behind. Thank you Dennis.
It still is. It's the first, foremost, and only recommendation we give for a C book on Freenode among the veterans.
K&R is how I initially learned of Ritchie, along with Unix and hacker lore.
This is a sad day for me personally. We're starting to the lose the original hackers.
We need to start thinking about biographies and archival options. I appreciate that dmr was a private man, but we need to start making more opportunities to interview these guys.
Zed Shaw's work might eventually supplant K&R as my choice for a tutorial for people new to C, but I'll always recommend it to people who really want to know their roots.
Viewing comments with showdead on is good but it makes viewing the new page difficult when half the page is auto-banned links.
I "feel" more of a loss about Dennis' passing than Steve's.
Dennis Ritchie is a different thing. As other people have pointed, in my opinion there is no current technology that was not "touched" by the contributions that R&K did. Being it Unix or C, these are two of the most important software creations in history.
RIP Dennis Ritchie.
main() { printf("Thank you for creating me\n"); printf("RIP,Mr.Ritchie\n"); }
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.
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 languages that themselves are written in C?
dmr is part of an very small group of computer scientists that truly changed the paradigm of computing for everyone everywhere (Turing, von Neumann, Engelbart, ...) As long as there are ones and zeros his name will be remembered.
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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal
For GUI programming there was (and is) the Pascal dialect Delphi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarcadero_Delphi
What would the world look like if C would have been never invented? I guess our browsers would simply be coded in Turbo Pascal dialect.
And Visual Basic is still huge (#12 on langpop.com). Also someone could reasonably argue that from the concept and ideas SmallTalk and Lisp were way more influential than C.
That said, I feel a bit dirty to make this argument. Dennis Ritchie should be praised for his accomplishments.
I wonder what the Turbo Pascal compilers were written in...
With Unix and C , he has changed the way people think of computers and the way of talking to them.
true but it's from P7, "C progamming language", pure K&R.
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.
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
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indent_style