Dennis Ritchie is gone.....

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Dennis Ritchie is gone.....

Postby Crispin Metzler » Thu Oct 13, 2011 3:49 pm

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Re: Dennis Ritchie is gone.....

Postby Doug Coulter » Thu Oct 13, 2011 4:47 pm

Normally, the water cooler - that's our self-emptying general discussion area (threads autodelete there if no posts in 10 days). But this guy was special. His partner in crime was a fellow I knew personally back when there weren't many of us who knew what computers were good for...but left the outfit I was working for to go to Bell labs and actually invent this funky new computer language. We couldn't blame him, of course. I don't think you can call yourself a real computer programmer these days if you haven't owned K&R C - and you know, it's still the best for teaching new programmers, especially for situations like embedded uP's where the fancy features of all the now-standard libraries aren't there, nor is C++ a reasonable thing to consider. And if you know C/C++, well, all the other HLL's are pretty much at your fingertips too - Java is just C++ without pointers (but it's all references, which makes me laugh), Perl is just C without strong typing (using perl sometimes makes old C programmers want to wash up afterwards), and so on. After that, it's mostly a matter of "how do I do that *here*, not so much "what can, or should, I do?".

And this machine is running Linux...which was mapped from Unix. I quit windows as soon as I wasn't being paid to specialize in that...(can't think of a printable word) operating system.

Those were fun days. Even then I looked like now (using being a rock musician as an excuse) and so did he. In our business, looking like a hippie bum was a badge of honor. Everyone else dealing with these expensive new-fangled computer things had to seriously conform -- either button down collar, tie, suit, or perhaps military dress uniform. Only if you were REALLY GOOD did you get to be the roving hippie everyone depended on to make their world work correctly. They didn't like that much, but couldn't really say anything -- you can't be a successful manager without something to manage that worked right, after all. The security types hated that we had badges that said things like "All DOD" with the special borders on them and such like - no restrictions to "need to know" were possible when only a few guys existed who could make it all "go" when it mattered. I ran into K&R a time or few when I was doing my stint as regional support for DEC hardware, cool guys...

We'll miss you Dennis.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Dennis Ritchie is gone.....

Postby Starfire » Fri Oct 14, 2011 7:04 am

Indeed a sharp mind now gone - his precession with software is legendary.
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