Dennis Ritchie, Creator of C Programming Language, Passed Away 725
WankerWeasel writes "The sad news of the death of another tech great has come. Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language and a key developer of the Unix operating system, has passed away. For those of us running Mac OS X, iOS, Android and many other non-Windows OS, we have him to thank. Many of those running Windows do too, as many of the applications you're using were written in C."
dmr (Score:5, Insightful)
Mourn for his passing, but celebrate his life. He didn't just change the world, he make world.
Re:dmr (Score:4, Funny)
Re:dmr (Score:5, Funny)
He didn't just change the world, he make world.
I thought he just said hello to it... :)
RIP
Re:dmr (Score:5, Funny)
I C what you did there.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"I C what you did there." plus thinking objectively he had class
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
He was certainly a strong type.
Re:dmr (Score:5, Funny)
he gave us more than a few pointers
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pointers are redundant...
obviously a java dev
Re:dmr (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet there won't even by any news in most places about him, because he didn't make shiny things.
Richie > Jobs . (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Richie Jobs . (Score:3)
Heck, Ritchie was one hell of a giant - it's easier to name people famous in IT who didn't stand on his shoulders. Come to think of it, if you restrict yourself to the last 30 years or so, it'll probably be an empty set.
Re:dmr (Score:4, Insightful)
>Greedy misanthropist that sold shiny gadgets with sweatshop labor dies and is praised by millions.
>Creator of the most widely used programming language of all time and pioneer of Unix, both arguably a significant contributing factor to the success of every modern tech company, dies and not a single newspaper cares.
Inventor of C and UNIX. 4chan has a sticky for him. That's the extent of media coverage I could find.
A real legend of technology has died and nobody will even understand what he did.
exit(0);
Re:dmr (Score:5, Insightful)
he wasn't famous for being famous or sleeping around. he wasn't a sports hero. he didn't ruin an economy (or several). he didn't make billion dollar films. he didn't start or fight in wars.
therefore, no one in the media cares. ;(
yeah, we have our priorities right in this world. oh yeah.
What is wrong with you people? (Score:4, Insightful)
Men like Ritchie developed the tools that we enjoy to use to do our jobs, men like Steve Jobs brought the customers that pay for the food in our table and the roof over our heads. The praise that both have received is well deserved, and, in the case of Ritchie, it has been far too low for his accomplishments.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It takes time, but it is percolating up to broader/general media [bbc.co.uk].
Re:dmr (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:dmr (Score:4, Interesting)
If you (or others) haven't read his essays on the history of C [bell-labs.com] and UNIX [bell-labs.com], you should. He was a fantastic writer, and he managed to make such "dry" subjects palatable for even non-programmers. Indeed, reading memoirs of his time at Bell Labs during the 1970s takes you there, with him, while he and his colleges developed the core technologies that would create the world we're in today.
There are several other essays written by him, but those two are the ones I've had bookmarked for a very long time and stand out in my mind.
Goodbye (Score:5)
Just a couple of words: Thank You.
Re:Goodbye (Score:4, Informative)
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Look, dmr did have a huge impact on the current state of affairs within the computing industry, and far beyond. But let's not pretend that things wouldn't have developed otherwise. The direction and outcome may have been very different, of course, but progress would have continued.
If C hadn't arisen, we'd likely be using a language derived from PL/I or Pascal, both of which were C's main competitors in the 1970s. Hell, in an alternate world, maybe even Smalltalk would have taken off, had C not been so popul
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That's very unlikely since the FSF deals with licensing not the actual code.
Re:Goodbye (Score:4, Informative)
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Of course not. Someone might have invented another language fulfilling the same role, and being as good in that. But I strongly doubt that it would have been C. Maybe it would have been a better language. Maybe it would have been a worse language. But it would not have been the same language.
Re:Goodbye (Score:4, Insightful)
If Einstein had not developed Relativity, someone else would have, so I guess we can just sort of ignore or make light his contributions to physics on /. to make ourselves look kewl.
Bullshit. Much more than Steve Jobs Ritchie was one of the key figures in the development of modern computing. C and Unix are among the major touchpoints in computer history, both to soon become dominant players in application development and operating systems.
This is like saying "Someone else would have laid the groundwork of modern computing, so while Alan Turing was a real smart and influential guy..."
Re: (Score:3)
Comparing him to Steve Jobs is a bit disingenuous. They did two very different, but both key functions that led to this modern age of information.
Dennis Ritchie laid the groundwork for modern computing.
Steve Jobs popularized it.
Re: (Score:3)
But ... comments like yours seriously piss me off - do you really think that if Ritchie hadn't created C, that no one else would have?
He still did it, didn't he? He helped created both a low-level language and a OS that are still widely used everywhere, 40 years later.
His contribution to our everyday life shouldn't be understated.
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The world just doesn't sit stagnant like that.
While agreeing with you that a Unix equivalent would likely have shown up, I'm not so sure about C. (Granted this goes for Kerninghan too, not just Ritchie.) The world prefers to take something it has and continue to improve upon it. C had a ridiculous impact on the syntax and usage of programming languages. The most widely used languages all use many facets of C-Like syntax. Especially in the tech world where legacy code frequently causes projects to never get re-written in a better language. A Unix equiva
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How is the OS X working out for you?
Funny how you didn't post the same thing about people decrying we wouldn't have computers without Steve Jobs.
"I'm not trying to detract from Ritchies achievements"
The stop doing it.
"however, don't think that he was the only chance for that advancement.."
there is no guarantee of advancements. Never has been. Empires have fallen because no one came up with a solution to a problem. It every case, in hindsight the solution seemed obvious.
Re:Goodbye (Score:4, Funny)
No, Windows is written in Visual Basic.
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I wasn't saying other products would not have eventuated. Maybe they would have been better. But the computing landscape today would look vastly different without his contributions.
Whether you like C or not, it served a very focused purpose: be small and simple enough to be easy to port to new hardware architectures, and be close enough to assembly to get low level shit done.
If C didn't come out and take off, something else with similar characteristics no doubt would have. No, it would NOT be a full
stdout (Score:5, Interesting)
goodbye world
Not just the apps (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of Windows is written in C.
Re:Not just the apps (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of everything computer-related owes something to C.
Without his work, the whole world would not be the same.
Thank you Dennis.
Re:Not just the apps (Score:4, Insightful)
I think there are very few, if not none, things where C would be the best language to use anymore.
But when it was created, it was another world, and low level languages were needed because there was a lot less computing power available, and you didn't want to waste any.
But the larger part of the C heritage is not in application written in C, but in everything written in languages derived from C (like C++), or derived from languages derived from C (like almost every language less than 30 years old).
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But when it was created, it was another world, and low level languages were needed because there was a lot less computing power available, and you didn't want to waste any.
To put this in perspective:
The Xerox Alto ran Smalltalk. It ran a VM, which was written in a static subset of Smalltalk that was natively compiled, and the rest of the code was interpreted bytecode from a dynamic, object-oriented language, including a GUI, an introspective development environment, and some apps. It required a microcoded BitBlt instruction to be able to achieve a usable speed. This was on a processor that didn't even reach 1MHz, with half a meg of RAM.
Objective-C was created in 1986 b
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"Most of the work we do as developers is string manipulation."
Perhaps most of the work YOU do as a developer is String manipulation. But that does not necessarily apply to everyone. As for C-strings being poor, Ritchie and other C-developers made most of their design decisions for a reason. Strings as we know them now, i.e. C++ std::string, MFC CString, QString, etc. were not a realistic alternative when C was developed and the actual realistic alternatives, i.e. Pascal strings, had their own drawbacks (fix
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Actually, most of windows is written in shit
Thanks for your thoughtful and appropriate comment on the death of a computer great.
Re:Not just the apps (Score:4, Interesting)
Not according to Windows Internals, Fifth Edition.
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Native code in Windows is mostly written in both C and C++, in that you will see both .c and .cpp files, but since all DLL interfaces in Windows are C interfaces (C++ interfaces basically require you to be using the same compiler, though you can use COM to wrap C++ classes to build portable OO interfaces), even the .cpp files tend to be more C-like than C++-like.
There are C++ developers at Microsoft who do very ninja C++ things. But for the most part, people using .cpp files might as well be using C - many
Re:Not just the apps (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but you can't blame dmr for that.
Re: (Score:3)
That's completely false, please turn in your geek card.
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
int class = 0;
return class;
}
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Even if that were the case, it doesn't mean the compiled program will exhibit the same behavior:
#include
int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
assert(sizeof('a') == sizeof(int));
return 0;
}
Re:Not just the apps (Score:5, Informative)
C is actually a subset of c++ as in all c programs will compile with a c++ compiler but C++ will not compile in a c compiler.
No it isn't. Some examples:
Valid C, not valid C++. How about a more complicated one?
Valid C, not valid C++. Or another simple one:
Once again, valid C, not valid C++. The semantics of inline are very different in C and C++. And here's a really fun one:
If sizeof(int) is 4 and alignof(int) is 4, this prints 4 in C and 12 in C++.
Why am I such a geek?
I didn't know that the definition of 'geek' had been changed to 'someone who believes falsehoods'.
Thank you (Score:4, Insightful)
Thank you for everything (Score:2)
I would hope that, were Jobs still alive, he would thank Dennis for OSX.
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And no patents (Score:5, Insightful)
Dennis Ritchie had an impact on the technology world FAR beyond what Jobs and Apple could ever dream of. Do you have any idea how many billions of lines of C code are running in the world, or how many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Unix-derived systems are running? Linux, OS/X, AIX, Solaris, HP/UX -- they all owe their origins to this man. Rest in peace, sir.
Had he been a patent hound, he'd have died a rich man.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Had he been a patent hound, he'd have died a rich man.
I doubt it. Most of what he created was part of the 'worse is better' philosophy. Given the choice between C and Algol, most people would have picked Algol in the '80s, but C compilers were cheaper (or free), so they went with C. The same with UNIX. There were much better operating systems around, but they were either expensive, required expensive hardware or, in many cases, both. C and UNIX were both good enough and free. That usually beats really good and expensive. If they'd tried to make a large
Re:And no patents (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:And no patents (Score:4, Informative)
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I mostly agree, but a quick rebuttal:
The declaration syntax is only horrid when you need to declare something complex. "int i;" is about as simple as you could ever expect a declaration to be, and 99% of all variables fall along those lines. It's the rare cases of declaring arrays of function pointers returning pointers to arrays of function pointer-pointers (throwing in const in a few places for good measure) that get to be horrid.
Another important thing to remember is that C only tries to lightly abstra
Re:And no patents (Score:5, Insightful)
The 'worse is better' philosophy is more an argument about simplicity rather than price ("worse" functionality correlates to "better" practicality). Some of the best patents are actually for simple inventions used to do something novel. The novelty in UNIX and C isn't price (i.e., cheap/free), but portability (they're VERY simple designs yet powerful enough to write a self-compiler) -- and that made it better than the alternatives such as Algol. Not just marginally, it really WAS much better because hardware was developing so fast at the time (birth of personal computing, remember?) and Algol simply couldn't keep up.
Ritchie definitely could have made a large profit from the whole shebang if he wanted to. He didn't.
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This is as it always has been.
The whole of humanity celebrates celebrities. (I wonder if there is a connection between those two words?) The reality is as reality always has been. Steve Jobs was a greedy sociopath. The people who actually make and do things are employed and used by the previously mentioned sociopaths.
It is an EXTREMELY rare person who can create great things and also be a great leader and icon. At the moment, I can't think of any. But other parallel examples of this scenario come to mind --
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Had he been a patent hound, he'd have died a rich man.
I know that this sounds cheesy, but if you go by the sentiments of Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life", he was a rich man.
Thanx Dennis and godspeed.
myke
Re:And no patents (Score:4, Insightful)
If he had been a patent hound, we'd be years behind where we are now in software.
Re: (Score:2)
Billions? I'm wiling to bet trillions. Or more.
When Steve died, i set my wall paper to a picture of him with a few clicks. When Dennis Ritchie died, I slipped a small quote from him into my bashrc. If there's not a stark contrast between what these two men did, and why, I can't find it.
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Sorry, but I haven't run into a BSD system since the late '80s, so I forgot about it.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, except for all those OS X machines (the kernel is largely Mach with a BSD subsystem, but all the user land stuff was pretty much jacked from FreeBSD and NetBSD. Hell, Apple hired a large number of the people who were in the FreeBSD core team when I was in high school). JunOS is basically FreeBSD, too, if you use any Juniper stuff. Some of my app and DB servers at work are FreeBSD, and I have a new Juniper router ready to go into the new lab when its done being built. Then again, as my name suggest
RIP (Score:5, Funny)
main()
{
printf("Goodbye, World");
}
-RIP dmr
Re: (Score:2)
+1 with no mod points.
Re: (Score:2)
main() { printf("Goodbye, World"); }
-RIP dmr
Win.
Re: (Score:2)
Warning: no return type specified for function "main".
Re: (Score:3)
It's K&R, not ANSI.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh right; that would explain this cover [images-amazon.com], then.
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Yes, he has moved on to the "void main()"
I seriously did not care that Jobs died and was a little glad to see the end of the idol worship it cultivated through his marketing style. But with the passing of dmr, I actually feel a sense of loss even if he hasn't done anything recently or had any known "incomplete projects."
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In this case /. needs a +1 poignant
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Don't forget the linebreak.
I always forget the linebreak.
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You forgot
#include
One time I was frustrated from debugging some C code and a non coder figured they may try to help... In a brink of what he though was genius he went to me. "I found your problem you spelled Studio wrong!"
Granted compiling the code I got less errors but it didn't solve the problem (I didn't quite want to explain that meant standard input output).
I have nothing intelligent to post (Score:5, Insightful)
...but this is just sad. This guy did stuff I care about.
Godspeed.
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Less than 10 comments for Ritchie? (Score:2)
Is this world full of morons?
One of the fathers of the modern computing operating sistem, co-creator of C and UNIX, and less than 10 comments?
People is sick.
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Well, I facebook'd it - and to this day I still write a lot of C code, for open-source, commercial and even embedded systems now. It's been over 20 years and I'm still finding it a useful tool a lot of the time.
Shaped many of our careers... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's no exaggeration that without Dennis Ritchie's contributions, many of us would have very different careers. I've been fortunate to spend the first 12 years of my IT career working on multiple Unix and Linux systems, and although I'm not much of a coder, I've compiled a fair amount of C and recognise that if it hadn't been invented, neither would C++ or C#, which constitutes a lot of the code in use today.
Without Unix, what would the Internet been built on? Perhaps something like VMS? Would tools like Sendmail or BIND been developed in those environments? The influence of Unix can be seen everywhere in IT.
Actually, without Unix, we wouldn't have had NeXTstep, which became MacOS X, which became iOS. We wouldn't have had Minix or Linux, so no Android. So the mobile landscape would have been different as well.
I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say that Dennis Ritchie's legacy is the IT industry we have today. Most of us stand on this giant's shoulders.
RIP Dennis Ritchie.
So long and thanks for all the csh :-( (Score:2)
It's a little unnerving to think about how long Unix has been part of my career. Thanks, dmr.
Rest in Peace (Score:2)
printf("Hello, Heaven");
To me this is for more significant than the passing of Mr. Jobs.
Saddest news of the year (Score:2)
Apart from personal loss.
His contributions to computing have been effecting us all for nigh on 40 years and that effect has been overwhelmingly beneficial. It's extremely likely (barring anything bad happening in 2038) that we will all continue to reap the benefit of DMR's existence for many decades to come.
Goodby and thank you, sir (Score:2)
A tribute in triangles (from 2008) (Score:2)
Dennis Ritchie [contextfreeart.org]
RIP Dennis (Score:2)
RIP Dennis Ritchie (Score:2)
May you be remembered and celebrated for all that you brought to computing. I hope your name will not be forgotten from history. The fact that your death is announced as 'another great one' in the same breath as... someone else makes me scared for your rightful place in it.
I am truly sad that you are gone.
I've been getting ready for this (Score:2)
Have you realized that the first generation of hackers is starting to reach that age?
It's a huge loss for the world. Ritchie was a genius, a great man, and he helped change the world forever in the right direction.
C and Unix changed the entire world. The popularization of computing, moving it away from the universities and into the private space of companies and homes started with C and Unix. It revolutionized Operating System and software design in general completely, indirectly giving birth to just about
now *that* is a loss to the IT Community :/ (Score:3)
Here is a clip of Ritchie explaining Unix (although I ~knew~ him mostly through his work on C)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7FjX7r5icV8 [youtube.com]
The old testament (Score:2)
Ha ! The value of *my* copy of 'C' can only go up !
not just a passing fad (Score:2)
I started off as an computer science student, but switched to engineering.
time and again, i asked to take C rather than Fortran.
they said C was just a passing fad.
his language will out live us all.
One of the Great Ones has passed (Score:3)
Without the work of dmr and the rest of the 1127 group at Bell Labs, the computing landscape we take for granted would be radically different, and many of us would be in other lines of work.
UNIX isn't the perfect OS, but it does better, in more environments, than anything else out there. Jobs and Torvalds would have very different lives if not for the work Ritchie did.
Requiescat in pace, dmr.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (Score:2)
Godspeed Dennis.
SFW link, please (Score:4, Informative)
Spent 5 seconds to find one that isn't blocked by proxy servers:
Father of C and UNIX Dennis Ritchie passes away at age 70 [techcrunch.com]
My memory of Dennis Ritchie (Score:5, Interesting)
I started learning C on FreeBSD 2.2.8 when I was in the 8th grade. In 9th grade, the internet was still a much wilder place than it is today, and felt a lot friendlier and smaller. As such, I didn't really see anything wrong with emailing random "public figures" to ask them questions. Of course, some didn't respond, some were rude assholes (Linus, I'm looking at you...), but some were truly amazing. In the amazing category would be Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, both of whom would answer my emails promptly and regularly. I corresponded with both of them for the better part of a year and a half, before doing things like getting a girl friend. Both Ken and Dennis were more than happy to hep me out with questions, give me advice and steer me in the right direction.
I wish I still had those emails but, alas, I don't. Of all the digital "property" I wish I had never lost, those emails are pretty much the only thing on the list. I don't know where I would be in life, or what I would be doing, if it weren't for the work they did and their guidance when I was younger. Dennis might be the first "famous" person that I've ever felt like the world was poorer in some way for losing.
Re: (Score:3)
My story goes back a bit further, I think. In 1985-6, I was a senior in High School and already a massive computer geek. My senior year school day consisted of a math class, an English class, and the rest of the day was spent in the computer lab. We mostly played on TRS-80 Model 4's but also enjoyed running a DEC PDP-8 which had 2K of core memory, two 512K drum drives the size of refrigerators, a Teletype printer console, and a bunch of whirring DECtape drives. Unfortunately it didn't run Unix, it ran RS
A Different Life (Score:3)
I never met the man, but it was his code that shaped the rest of my life. In 1978 I entered college to be a physicist. When I discovered I had to actually understand Calculus to get past the basics of physics, I found my way over to the computer lab. There I ran my first program, but as a consumer, not a creator. I was amazed and had to know how the program worked so I went to see the head of the department. The next day I signed up for CS101 for the next semester.
the Head of Comp Sci, just the year before had decided to radically change the direction of the CompSci program from understanding/learning the mainframe world to the emerging mini computers. Out when IBM and in came DEC PDP/11. Out went COBOL, in came C, RATFOR, FORTRAN, and Pascal along with assembler. My first Comp Sci book was K&R and I referenced that book for years. I'll grant he shaped the world, but he did it one programmer at a time. My variation:
Void Main() {
printf("Thank You Richie, from The World");
}
(for those noting that he has not gotten any major press, that is the difference between creation and marketing. Jobs was marketing magician, and very good at his job. Folks like Woz, Richie, Tim Patterson, these creators were the foundations which allowed minds like Jobs or Gates to exist. Their drive was not on attention, but creation. Today's media has little time on depth so they just follow the rule, sex sells and the creator of a programming language is not sexy, the king of marketing shiny devices that do fun things, he's sexy)
Goodbye (Score:3)
#include
int main()
{
printf("Goodbye Dennis and thanks for all the code!");
}
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Stuff that matters (Score:4, Informative)
Now this matters. Goodbye and well done.
Re: (Score:2)
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Re:He was an atheist (Score:4, Informative)
You know, the majority of all people ever born has not yet died. Therefore the evidence that everyone eventually dies is not very good. :-)
Rubbish [guardian.co.uk]