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Dennis Ritchie Home Page (2006)
- mikemaney 5y agoSomewhere on the Internet exists a Plan 9 press release with my name on it. When I had a chance to corner a few of Dennis's colleagues at Mobile World Congress (they were, at that time, part of Alcatel-Lucent), I asked them for their memories of working alongside him. Please excuse the audio, I was working with a FlipCam and just focused on capturing what I could for the history books. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE4ZRPwbNhA&t=141s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE4ZRPwbNhA&t=141s
- dopeboy 5y agoThe first book I bought for programming was C Programming Language. Freshman year, 2004, for EECS 10 at UCI. To my delight, it remains part of the curriculum of the course, 17 years later with the same instructor too: https://newport.eecs.uci.edu/~doemer/f19_eecs10/syllabus.html https://newport.eecs.uci.edu/~doemer/f19_eecs10/syllabus.htm...
- googamooga 5y agoI‘ve been working for Lucent Technologies in Moscow, Russia from 2000 to 2004. I remember my feelings when I looked up Dennis Ritchie in PeopleSoft, corporate directory - hey, I work in the same company with a man who invented Unix and C! Lucent was a great place to work, even in Russia. :)
- elnatro 5y agoA titan among humans, co-creator of C and UNIX, a statue should be erected to this man.
- redsummer 5y ago
- sillysaurusx 5y agoTheoretically, how would one build a statue of Dennis? Yes, I’m serious. If it costs less than $10k, I’d love to make a statue of Dennis and put it somewhere in my house. Partly to show off my excellent sensibilities in artistic taste on my otherwise barren walls. But mostly I just realized I have no idea how statues are made circa 2022, and it sounds fun{,ny}.
- elnatro 5y agoI mean a statue-homage in his city or town, I’m not even American but would donate to this cause.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoCertainly. I would too. But wouldn’t it be cool to go down to your laundry room or wherever and see a bigass Dennis Ritchie statue? I suppose I could put it in the yard, facing a neighbor’s window. Then we’d be able to dress Dennis for Halloween and Christmas too. But for real, is it completely impractical to want your own statue of someone? Rich people do it, and it’s been a few centuries, so I bet technology has worked its usual magic on the price... EDIT: in Germany you can get a 3D printed 10 inch figurine for $400: https://doob3d.com/ https://doob3d.com/ so this is possible in principle. Other refs: https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-life-sized-statue-of-someone https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-life-s...
- rectang 5y agoRequiring something weatherproof which can be displayed outside and not degrade quickly when exposed to the elements will dramatically increase the cost. Can you make your artistic point with something which can only be displayed inside?
- TheMonarchist 5y agoHow about designing a DR balloon instead? Costs would be divided by mass production.
- klelatti 5y agoI think the best monument to DR is the software billions of us use every day. Best thing we can do is make more people aware of his work.
- tragomaskhalos 5y agoIt's a shame that the Americans don't have a culture of putting luminaries (other than presidents obviously) on their bank notes; it's a wonderful and far-reaching way of celebrating a person's contribution to the culture. Even so, Ritchie might be considered a little niche for such an accolade, but it's a nice thought experiment nevertheless.
- user3939382 5y agoHis recognition level is niche but his contributions aren’t. His language (C) and OS both literally (UNIX->BSD->macOS/iOS) and in design (Linux/Android) is powering a huge part of civilization.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoDennis was 30 when he published the first Unix software manual, according to his homepage: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/1stEdman.html https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/1stEdman.html It’s interesting to wonder which 30yo’s project today might have as much impact. You may think it’s impossible, but 40 years is a long time. People always underestimate the impact of decades, and overestimate the impact of years.
- Stratoscope 5y ago> People always underestimate the impact of decades, and overestimate the impact of years. Sometimes cited as Gates' Law, and also attributed to Arthur C. Clarke, Tony Robbins, or Peter Drucker. But they may have all gotten the idea from Roy Amara. https://fs.blog/gates-law/ https://fs.blog/gates-law/
- sillysaurusx 5y agoThank you! I’d always wondered if it was a Gates original, and what the history was.
- Stratoscope 5y agoIt reminds me of the famous Steve Jobs quote, "Good artists borrow, great artists steal." Apparently Steve stole that quote from Pablo Picasso, who borrowed it from Igor Stravinsky, who lifted it from T.S. Eliot. https://www.uvu.edu/arts/applause/posts/stealing.html https://www.uvu.edu/arts/applause/posts/stealing.html
- p0d 5y agoI sometimes think modern culture has lost a grip on the past. Much has gone before us and much will go after us. I find reading the Unix Manual comforting as it reminds me where we have come from. It was written a handful of weeks after I was born and I am still using it's commands fifty years later.
- knolan 5y agoI worked in Bell Labs from 2012 to 2018, unfortunately then it was a shadow of its former self. The MBAs had taken over. While there Weldon tried to pivot the place from being ‘like twitter’ to an incubator to a like a startup. He got an Apple Watch so we were going to be a wearables lab. He threw together a book on the supposed future of networks and conspired to get it to the NYT #1 by forcing us all to buy it. There were endless reorganisations. Disastrous leads parachuted in to wreck groups. Weldon played favourite to an alarming degree only to turn on them when they didn’t deliver on the aforementioned vapid promises. We had endless managers holding endless meetings telling the smart people what they should be doing and not listening to what the smart people wanted to or could do. All hands meetings telling us how great everything was while they were letting a third of us go. They engaged in vanity projects like putting a 4G network on the moon and getting us to build endless fake demos for technologies that didn’t exist and then acting surprised when told said technology didn’t exist. The funny thing was that the old timers over in Murray Hill just ignored all of this and continued to work away on their research untouchable like some prize zoo exhibit. It was a place full of the most wonderfully intelligent people managed by fools who wasted fortunes on flashy demos rather that let the smart people take the time to build something.
- Angle_Devoid 5y agoI'm assuming bells labs no longer has the financial backing of a monopoly like AT&T that they had 40 years ago?
- Zeromika 5y agoI suppose even if they had the funding the company itself is at it's value extraction phase.
- gompertz 5y agoThey are now owned by Nokia.
- knolan 5y agoIt was cleaved off AT&T as part of Lucent and then merged with Alcatel. Part of the problem there was that it was never clear if Lucent merged with Alcatel or if Alcatel acquired Lucent. The whole company was pretty dysfunctional but nothing too unusual there. Nokia came along flush with MS money from the sale of their handset business to buy Alcatel Lucent and got Bell Labs for free. Neither company was doing particularly well flogging network gear and together they didn’t do much better.
- penlightment 5y agoR.I.P Legend
- Angle_Devoid 5y agoTheir works still live among us, if anyone tried to look close enough, they would still see their names all over it
- srvmshr 5y agoI was working on an annotated (unofficial) edition of K&R updated to the latest C standards, with commentary like the Lion's book on UNIX, completely typeset in LaTeX. Sadly, I don't think it will ever see the light of the day due to copyright. I had some correspondence with DMR in my early college days. It would have been an ideal tribute.
- throwawayt215 5y agoMaybe reach out to Kernighan?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- srvmshr 5y agoOur initial request was forwarded to Pearson and their lawyer responded with a heavy-handed threat.
- user3939382 5y agoIf you’re interested, I’d try to get ahold of an executive at Pearson. Some big corp lawyer has 0 concept of the significance of your work and doesn’t have the authority to green light anything anyway.
- ascari 5y agoWhen I was 14, I emailed him to thank for his work. Years later he humbly responded and said he is surpised that C is still around.
- ztetranz 5y agoTIL, he never received his PhD because he didn't provide a bound copy of his thesis to the Harvard library. https://computerhistory.org/blog/discovering-dennis-ritchies-lost-dissertation/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/discovering-dennis-ritchies...
- cookingoils 5y agoLots of HTML Energy here!
- raister 5y agoFrom Wikipedia: "News of Ritchie's death was largely overshadowed by the media coverage of the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, which occurred the week before." NOW I'm sad. RIP Richie, your place in computing heaven is secured.
- vram22 5y agoHN had the black bar at the top when Dennis Ritchie died, and a thread about it.
- hulitu 5y agoHN has a weak spot for Marketroids like Jobs or Musk. It it sad that the people being praised are not the ones doing the work, just the ones presenting it. For me, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Alfred Aho are real people who built something. The others (Musk, Jobs) are only opportunists with a big mouth.
- smoldesu 5y agoYeah, it really frustrates me that this site's startup culture worships people who are veritably garbage individuals as opposed to recognizing the people who, you know, actually built the stuff in the first place. I struggle imagining a world where so-called hackers respect Jobs more than Wozniak or Dennis Ritchie, but here we are...
- jbirer 5y agoEven though I never met or knew Ritchie I still feel bad when I read about his death, when I was a teen I would go in rabbit holes reading about C and Unix, and would read about all the design decisions he made and the rationales for it, a true loss for the programming world. The concepts of minimalism and modularism are being thrown away and it shows in the performance and stability of new software. It's a shame we have to learn the same lessons over and over.
- shorts_theory 5y agoThat sounds interesting. Could you link some sources where I can read more about Ritchie's design decision for C and Unix?
- bitexploder 5y agoOn the other hand, hardware has continued to expand to support the bloat in software. I do agree computer software design could be better, thanks Electron. My most used piece of software is written in Java. I also spend a lot of time in Electron. My terminal is written in D (Tilix). I guess my point is, it could be better, but there is no incentive to make it leaner so no one will try. Nothing is really stopping anyone from running old school Linux software though. I know guys who run FVWM and really minimalist configurations of their Linux systems.
- Angle_Devoid 5y ago>Even though I never met or knew Ritchie I still feel bad when I read about his death, when I was a teen I would go in rabbit holes reading about C and Unix, and would read about all the design decisions he made and the rationales for it, a true loss for the programming world. sounds a lot like me, even I still read docs related to old school UNIX and C to this day >The concepts of minimalism and modularism are being thrown away and it shows in the performance and stability of new software. It's a shame we have to learn the same lessons over and over. why though? is coding huge monolithic software easier to do rather than creating a set of modular and simple tools?
- voakbasda 5y ago
- vucetica 5y agoI was in 6th grade when I found "The C Programming Language" on the floor in my friend's house. I picked it up, took it home, and read it cover to cover. I didn't have a computer then, but I was absolutely sure about what I wanted to do in my life. Thank you, Mr. Ritchie and Mr. Kernighan for opening the world of computer science for me.
- mistrial9 5y agosurprising -- I picked up the same, also read it cover to cover, and wondered over and over what kind of thinking leads to the small assembly'ish idioms and quirky character IO definitions. "Structured Programming" was obvious to me, and using that design to build non-trivial programs was very compelling, but the constant emphasis on small, tricky ways to move around a character seemed driven by some intense factory of machine parts thinking, not clean abstractions or consistant naming or human-readable coding. I immediately wanted to try this "big phone network" core OS language on my portable home computer with apparently one-one hundred thousandth of the capacity. Other home computer companies were publishing C compilers rapidly with lots of feature tradeoffs, so there was no question that C was the thing to use for me. Not good design at all though -- machine requirement driven totally.
- voakbasda 5y agoI recently worked to update a Linux-based system that was originally built by a team that had previously implemented the same product on a microcontroller-based system. The Linux drivers are obviously direct ports of the old subsystems, without any apparent effort to understand or leverage existing kernel drivers or subsystems that could have simplified (or outright replaced) their custom functionality. It is unholy. Now, this might sound absurd by the standards of today (because it is), but this was the transition that every programmer had to make back when high level languages were introduced. It takes time to adapt to a paradigm shift, so it hardly seems surprising when vestiges of the “old ways” can be seen peeking through the curtains of the new abstraction.
- dhosek 5y agoI was lent a copy of K&R by an English teacher¹ in my high school (this was 1984ish). I still remember the smell of coffee and nicotine that was imbued in its pages and any time I deal with C code, the sense memory comes back to me. For a while, under the influence of K&R and The TeXbook, I contemplated going to Stanford to study computer science and then working at Bell Labs. I did neither. ⸻⸻⸻ 1. About ten years ago, I decided to try to reach out to him and thank him and comment about how out paths kind of were the inverse of each other—he had a degree in computer science but ended up teaching high school English, I had a degree in English and ended up programming computers—and I discovered that he had died a few months previous. Whenever possible, get in touch with those who influenced you earlier if just to say hi and thanks.
- xwowsersx 5y agoThe ease with which I was able to read this page has me wondering how much of the challenges I sometimes have with focus and attention have to do with modern web design where pages are littered with elements unrelated to the text (not to mention ads). It's hard to beat the readability of black text on a white background with a few <p>'s
- polar 5y agoThere are many Bell Labs these days: https://www.bell-labs.com/about/locations/ https://www.bell-labs.com/about/locations/
- gaws 5y agoNone will ever match the legendary group coming out of Murray Hill between the 60s and 70s.
- _HMCB_ 5y agoWhat’s not to love?! Loads fast. No pop-ups and scripts to get in the way. No Reader mode needed.