10 ms·
printf("goodbye, Dennis");
- bitops 15y ago"All operating systems know when they were born. Their internal clocks start counting from then, so they can calculate the date and time in the future. It is unclear whether it was Mr Ritchie or Mr Thompson who set the so-called start Unix time at January 1st, 1970. That moment came to be known as the epoch. Mr Ritchie helped bring it about. And with it, he ushered in a new era." Well said.
- awflick 15y agoIts a bit sad but the obituary is often the best article in the economist. In this case it was a very fitting tribute to a tech hero.
- jfb 15y agoI disagree, but that doesn't mean that I don't turn to the obituary page immediately on receipt of each week's issue. jfb: bringing down the median subscriber income of The Economist for 20 years.
- waterlesscloud 15y agoI've helped drag down the median for about 10 years myself. I wonder if their subscriber income stats aren't heavily bifurcated.
- ireadzalot 15y agoI always felt weird doing this. Almost always I turn to their Obit page when I get a new issue. Glad to know I am not the only one who does it.
- eru 15y agoI usually start with the funny letter to the editor. (Usually the last letter printed.)
- bodyfour 15y agoBased on the tone of the article I guess it was destined to be this weeks obituary, but Qaddafi died just before they went to press. So unfortunately it looks like dmr's obit is only online, unless they run it next week.
- eru 15y ago> Its a bit sad but the obituary is often the best article in the economist. That's not sad. That's actually the case for newspapers in general.
- zerostar07 15y agoIt would be pure class if wasn't for the late Mr. Jobs mention. Surely, one can think of hundreds of more concrete examples that C enabled other than iOS, like, i don't know, the Internet?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ig1 15y agoThe Economist ran an obit of Mr Jobs recently, hence it made sense to refer to it to help regular readers understand the context and relationship between the two figures.
- screwt 15y agoIt does. "Linus Torvalds ... reinvented Unix for the internet age" "Unix-like systems power several hundred million Apple and Android mobile devices, most internet firms' server farms" Given the massive amounts of attention shown to Jobs' death, mentioning him gives the article sensible context (especially considering that most Economist readers are unlikely to have hear of Ritchie).
- pjscott 15y agoI am slightly bothered by the lack of a '\n'.
- tmcb 15y agoYou're not the only one.
- matthavener 15y agoWhy?
- mhartl 15y agoThe code printf("goodbye, Dennis"); would give $ ./goodbye goodbye, Dennis$ What you want is to add a newline ('\n') at the end: printf("goodbye, Dennis\n"); Now you get $ ./goodbye goodbye, Dennis $ That's why the canonical "hello, world" program contains the line printf("hello, world\n");
- Lukeas14 15y ago"\n" is a linebreak which would guarantee the text is printed and place whatever output came afterwards on the next line.
- derefr 15y agoIsn't the output stream at least guaranteed to be flushed once on completion of the program, though?
- abc_lisper 15y ago> Babbage used his first Sun Unix workstation at university in the 1980s It says so in the article. Which Babbage are they talking about?
- mixmastamyk 15y ago"The blog takes its name from Charles Babbage, a Victorian mathematician and engineer who designed a mechanical computer."
- msbarnett 15y agoBabbage is the name of the Economist's Science & Tech blog, which this story was posted under. The blog name is being used to stand-in for the author's in that sentence.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- sbayless 15y agoBabbage is the name of the blog: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage From the description: "The blog takes its name from Charles Babbage" So I presume it refers to the author.
- jfb 15y agoThe blogger. It is customary at The Economist to assign to a columnist as a pseudonym the name of a foundational figure in whatever the column purports to be about ("Lexington" for their USA coverage, "Schumpeter" for the coverage of business, &c.). One person will write the column for a period, and then move on.
- abc_lisper 15y agoAhh.. I see
- polymatter 15y agoProbably the author - though why they stated it like that I haven't a clue. "About Babbage In this blog, our correspondents report on the intersections between science, technology, culture and policy. The blog takes its name from Charles Babbage, a Victorian mathematician and engineer who designed a mechanical computer"
- jfb 15y agoPeople who don't regularly read The Economist probably ought to. It wears its biases on its sleeve, and is the only place in the English language press to find quality, in-depth coverage of parts of the world other than the Lower East Side and the Isle of Dogs.
- lemming 15y agoFor Americans, perhaps. The Guardian is also excellent - I subscribe to their weekly and it's fantastic.
- cschmidt 15y agoYes, indeed. It is truly the smart person's news source. There's also an audio edition, where they read the entire issue word for work, which is the best way to spend a long commute. (It takes 8 hours or so.) It is free for subscribers of either the print or online editions.
- jamesbritt 15y agoAnd they have a very nice app for subscribers as well.
- ansy 15y agoI disagree with the Economist's lack of by-lines. Also, it has more of a dogmatic free market ideology than a bias [1]. Whether you agree with that ideology or not, I think it is bad journalism. The Economist basically puts itself on the same level of China's People's Daily nationalist newspaper. Not matter how good the writing might be, it is just propaganda of a different sort. [1] http://www.economist.com/help/about-us#About_The_Economist http://www.economist.com/help/about-us#About_The_Economist
- 6ren 15y agoIf iOS was derived from Mac OS X, isn't it also a unix? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS EDIT thanks, misread it.
- rodh257 15y agoyes, and the article mentions this twice
- ced 15y agoI'm curious about what a world without Mr. Ritchie would look like. What were the popular alternatives to C and Unix in 1970?
- shn 15y agoWe would all be living in Windows (DOS?) hell. :) Early in my career I was lucky to use Unix System V. I found those voluminous unix manuals so natural. I could find anything came to my mind less than a minute. Unix system was so coherent, so intuitive. I still enjoy unix prompt, shell to this day. His book "The C Programming Language" has been the best language book I have ever read. So succinct, but so rewarding for those who studied diligently. Such a beautiful book. I always took that thin book as a standard to compare all the technical books I encountered. If it is that fat I thought there must be something wrong with either the book or the subject of it. In a broader context: There was this article recently about Steve Jobs. In that it said somewhere around 90 billion passed through this life and only a few could be able to find his/her voice. Many died before his full potential could even be recognized by themselves. I wonder what would world look like if those could fulfill their talent to their maturity. Because not all societies of the past allowed such liberty for many.
- orblivion 15y ago> We would all be living in Windows (DOS?) hell. :) Would they program Windows in Pascal?
- crag 15y agoWhen I went to school, they taught using Pascal. Then you moved to C. Now I think it's just Java?
- crag 15y agoActually I'm not so sure about that. There was much debate at the time (when Windows 3.11 was everywhere) whether it was a subset of UNIX. At the very least, it was inspired by UNIX. Where would we be? Probably all running VMS (which by the way runs on PC's). Or maybe WangVS or something owned by CA now. //edited for typos
- luckydude 15y agoAs an old dude, been around since uucp was the only way we talked to each other, was on the arpa net when we had the 11th IMP that connected people in real time, I really can't honor Dennis enough. He was the real deal, very quiet, very passionate about what he did, he wrote, both in code and in papers, in a terse way that just got to the point. If you have not gotten copies of the Bell Labs Technical Journals that have all the Unix papers in them, you are in for a treat. Get them. Read them. They wrote about what they did and wrote well. If all of us wrote that well the world would be a better place. I've tried. It's not easy. When you read those you'll grow to like Brian and Ken as well. There is a lot of good there, I wouldn't hire anyone who had not read that stuff. Bell Labs ought to be getting some loving here and we ought to be trying to bring something like that back. It was home for Dennis and Brian and Ken and Unix.
- crag 15y agoI could not agree more. I remember reading about dmr and Bell labs back in the Byte days; when Microsoft and Apple were radical and the tech world revolved around IBM. I can't stress enough how fundamental this man, his work and Bell Labs was to our industry. These guys, they created the foundation that much of what have today is built on.
- bburky 15y agoI hadn't read the Unix papers, but I just tracked down Volume 57 of the Bell System Technical Journal online. I thought I'd share the link for anyone else interested: http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/vol57-1978/bstj-vol57-issue06.html http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/vol57-1978/bstj-vol57-iss... Now I just need to find the time to read it.
- makecheck 15y agoUnfortunate that they give Linus Torvalds so much praise for "reinventing Unix" with Linux. It was at least substantially, if not equally, made possible by projects such as GNU. Clearly the kernel was a huge and necessary part, but it was just that: a part.
- nobody3141 15y agoIt was also made possible by cheap ubiquitous i386 PCs - so it was really all due to the Microsoft monopoly
- sometimes 15y agoIs it wrong to wonder about Dennis' personal life? Did he marry, have kids, take a lover? Like to garden, travel, read? He is such an important and influential figure in the history of computing, but it feels like we know little about him beyond his professional accomplishments.
- ema 15y agoIt is not wrong to wonder about this stuff, but i don't think knowing it will help you.
- johnx123-up 15y agoAFAIK, he's never married. He lost his interest in soccer too after sometime. So he's steep geek with some interest to country music.
- johnx123-up 15y agoAFAIK, he's against to AT&T split. Can anybody share some info on that?
- ruffdev 15y agoPure class from The Economist
- MKT 15y agoRIP. Every time I type printf, I honor you, my friend
- ableal 15y agoWent down the wwww rabbit hole, found this current trove of Bell System Technical Journal PDFs http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/ http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/
- rbanffy 15y agoI don't feel it's right to use printf where a simple puts would suffice.
- zwilliamson 15y agoepoch time has a new meaning to me.