From: Miguel Ortiz Lombardía
Date: 2011/10/18
Hi community,
I have been waiting for someone more knowledgeable to write about the
passing away of Dennis Ritchie (8 October) especially after the recent
obituaries posted in the list. I confess I know little about him, except:
1/ He created the C language ( and together with Brian Kernighan wrote
an extremely useful book about it )
2/ He and Ken Thompson were key in the development of something called
UNIX...
Undoubtedly, he made an impact in our field.
--
Miguel
Architecture et Fonction des Macromolécules Biologiques (UMR6098)
CNRS, Universités d'Aix-Marseille I & II
Case 932, 163 Avenue de Luminy, 13288 Marseille cedex 9, France
----------
From: Tim Gruene
Dear Miguel,
There are a couple of well-written obituaries:
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/dennis-ritchie/
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/14/tech/innovation/dennis-ritchie-obit-bell-labs/
To acknowledge his work, you might start you list counting from 0 rather
than 1 and swap the two items, because C was developed since Fortran did
not match the requirements to develop an OS like UNIX.
Tim
- --
- --
Dr Tim Gruene
Institut fuer anorganische Chemie
Tammannstr. 4
D-37077 Goettingen
----------
From: Gerard Bricogne
Dear Miguel,
Your list of two astounding achievements by Ritchie reminds me of an
old satire of mutual assessment within academia, in cartoon form, showing a
group of cavemen talking intensely and secretively to each other about
another one who is standing anxiously in the distance. One of those in the
group is saying: "OK, so he discovered fire and invented the wheel - but
what has he done since?".
With best wishes,
Gerard.
--
=
----------
From: Sabuj Pattanayek
The silence on this list was deafening.
1983 Turing Award
1990 IEEE Hamming medal
1999 National Medal of Technology
2011 Japan Prize for Information and Communications (while he was
still alive I think)
Even if he hadn't done anything technologically innovative that was
made public since C and UNIX, his C book (which was the first
programming book I read in it's entirety) and the foundations of his
OS have helped countless millions of people. I find it sad that in
many undergrad computer science curricula, C is no longer being
taught. If you want to understand how software works under the hood
you either learn assembly or C.
----------
From: Gerard Bricogne
Dear Sabuj,
Your opening remark made me worried that the facetious "what has he
done since?" might be taken seriously ... . That was not what was intended!
A variant of the joke was about a similar committee in charge of evaluating
God's performance, and coming up with "Sure, he created the Universe, but
what has he done since?". I was certainly not implying that Dennis Ritchie
had slept on his laurels after the two pieces of work Miguel mentioned - I
was only trying to share some light humour about the often over-competitive
and pettily critical system under which we all have to live and operate.
----------
From: DUMAS Philippe (UDS)
Le Mardi 18 Octobre 2011 16:36 CEST, Sabuj Pattanayek <sabujp@GMAIL.COM> a écrit:
Should I understand that Gérard Brigogne really meant that Ritchie's achievements were peanuts ?
Yet, after so many years in England I thought Gerard mastered British humour rather well...
Encore un effort Gérard....
Philippe Dumas
----------
From: Ed Pozharski
In my humble opinion, the most important contribution was the
implementation of the portability concept by rewriting the UNIX OS in C.
The main impact of this step (which seems so trivial to us today) was
the creation of the programming community that speaks one language. The
opposite of what legend has god doing to the tower builders of Babel.
The russian translation of Kernighan&Ritchie was my first programming
book, and seemingly the only one I ever needed.
----------
From: Sabuj Pattanayek
> Are you saying that undergraduates do not learn to program any more, or that
> they use a more "advanced" language than C where they don't really learn
> what is going on?
The latter. It's usually Java and .NET nowadays IIRC.
----------
From: Eleanor Dodson
Also
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/13/dennis-ritchie
He was considered important enough to be highlighted in a general interest newspaper.
Eleanor
Date: 2011/10/18
Hi community,
I have been waiting for someone more knowledgeable to write about the
passing away of Dennis Ritchie (8 October) especially after the recent
obituaries posted in the list. I confess I know little about him, except:
1/ He created the C language ( and together with Brian Kernighan wrote
an extremely useful book about it )
2/ He and Ken Thompson were key in the development of something called
UNIX...
Undoubtedly, he made an impact in our field.
--
Miguel
Architecture et Fonction des Macromolécules Biologiques (UMR6098)
CNRS, Universités d'Aix-Marseille I & II
Case 932, 163 Avenue de Luminy, 13288 Marseille cedex 9, France
----------
From: Tim Gruene
Dear Miguel,
There are a couple of well-written obituaries:
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/dennis-ritchie/
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/14/tech/innovation/dennis-ritchie-obit-bell-labs/
To acknowledge his work, you might start you list counting from 0 rather
than 1 and swap the two items, because C was developed since Fortran did
not match the requirements to develop an OS like UNIX.
Tim
- --
- --
Dr Tim Gruene
Institut fuer anorganische Chemie
Tammannstr. 4
D-37077 Goettingen
----------
From: Gerard Bricogne
Dear Miguel,
Your list of two astounding achievements by Ritchie reminds me of an
old satire of mutual assessment within academia, in cartoon form, showing a
group of cavemen talking intensely and secretively to each other about
another one who is standing anxiously in the distance. One of those in the
group is saying: "OK, so he discovered fire and invented the wheel - but
what has he done since?".
With best wishes,
Gerard.
--
--
=
----------
From: Sabuj Pattanayek
The silence on this list was deafening.
1983 Turing Award
1990 IEEE Hamming medal
1999 National Medal of Technology
2011 Japan Prize for Information and Communications (while he was
still alive I think)
Even if he hadn't done anything technologically innovative that was
made public since C and UNIX, his C book (which was the first
programming book I read in it's entirety) and the foundations of his
OS have helped countless millions of people. I find it sad that in
many undergrad computer science curricula, C is no longer being
taught. If you want to understand how software works under the hood
you either learn assembly or C.
----------
From: Gerard Bricogne
Dear Sabuj,
Your opening remark made me worried that the facetious "what has he
done since?" might be taken seriously ... . That was not what was intended!
A variant of the joke was about a similar committee in charge of evaluating
God's performance, and coming up with "Sure, he created the Universe, but
what has he done since?". I was certainly not implying that Dennis Ritchie
had slept on his laurels after the two pieces of work Miguel mentioned - I
was only trying to share some light humour about the often over-competitive
and pettily critical system under which we all have to live and operate.
----------
From: DUMAS Philippe (UDS)
Le Mardi 18 Octobre 2011 16:36 CEST, Sabuj Pattanayek <sabujp@GMAIL.COM> a écrit:
Should I understand that Gérard Brigogne really meant that Ritchie's achievements were peanuts ?
Yet, after so many years in England I thought Gerard mastered British humour rather well...
Encore un effort Gérard....
Philippe Dumas
----------
From: Ed Pozharski
In my humble opinion, the most important contribution was the
implementation of the portability concept by rewriting the UNIX OS in C.
The main impact of this step (which seems so trivial to us today) was
the creation of the programming community that speaks one language. The
opposite of what legend has god doing to the tower builders of Babel.
The russian translation of Kernighan&Ritchie was my first programming
book, and seemingly the only one I ever needed.
----------
From: Sabuj Pattanayek
> Are you saying that undergraduates do not learn to program any more, or that
> they use a more "advanced" language than C where they don't really learn
> what is going on?
The latter. It's usually Java and .NET nowadays IIRC.
----------
From: Eleanor Dodson
Also
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/13/dennis-ritchie
He was considered important enough to be highlighted in a general interest newspaper.
Eleanor
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