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Dennis Ritchie Day 301

Posted by samzenpus from the celebrate-the-C dept.
mikejuk writes "Today we celebrate Dennis Ritchie Day, an idea proposed by Tim O'Reilly. Ritchie, who died earlier this month, made contributions to computing that are so deeply woven into the fabric that they impact us all. We now have to remark on the elephant in the room. If Dennis Ritchie hadn't died just after Steve Jobs, there would probably have been no suggestion of a day to mark his achievements. We have to admit that it is largely a response to the perhaps over-reaction to Steve Jobs which highlighted the inequality in the public recognition of the people who really make their world work."
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Dennis Ritchie Day More

Dennis Ritchie Day

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  • That's why the world works. (Score:4, Informative)

    by TheLink ( 130905 ) on Sunday October 30, 2011 @08:44AM (#37885768) Journal
    If we had days and events to recognize each and everyone who helped to make the world work, the world would not work.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Co0Ps ( 1539395 )

      > Come up with crazy suggestion inside your head. Explain to people how crazy that suggestion is and imply that this suggestion was the original suggestion.

      Also know as a strawman argument.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by hedwards ( 940851 )

      California had a day to recognize Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie had a much larger impact on the world at large than Steve did. Steve just was really good at PR.

      • Re:That's why the world works. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by jo_ham ( 604554 ) <joham999@gmail.cTIGERom minus cat> on Sunday October 30, 2011 @09:32AM (#37886002)

        You missed off "in my opinion" from the end of your comment. As good as "inventing Unix and C" is, "helping to ignite the home personal computer industry" is not far off. Neither did it alone, of course. And Dennis didn't court the spotlight like Jobs, but that doesn't automatically make Jobs' contributions any less profound. They both made pretty significant contributions in the genesis of the modern computing era.

        Should I start a thread on how Alan Turing is overrated because of Tom Flowers and Bill Tutte doing the heavy lifting on the Lorenz cipher - ie, the really hard one :p

        (for the record, I do not believe Alan Turing is overrated, but I should probably specifically spell that out for the purposes of quickfire moderators who read but don't comprehend)

        • Re:That's why the world works. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Improv ( 2467 ) <pgunn01@gmail.com> on Sunday October 30, 2011 @10:12AM (#37886180) Homepage Journal

          If you want to highlight one of the founders of Apple, the Woz was far more influential and important than Jobs. Also, a much better guy.

          • the Woz was far more influential and important than Jobs.

            Why so? Woz didn't do anything that others at the time weren't doing (neither did Jobs). The company basically fell apart when Jobs left and was restored to health when he returned. When Woz left, well nothing happened.

            Also, a much better guy.

            I see no evidence to support that, Woz would appear to be an arrogant self absorbed jerk (saying that as a arrogant self absorbed jerk myself). He seems very bitter about not being as widely recognized as Steve Jobs and tries to be snarky about anything related to Apple because it wasn't

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by jo_ham ( 604554 )

            And who says I won't? Why does it have to be mutually exclusive, is the point I'm driving at with the Ritchie/Jobs comparisons. It seems to be a common feature of slashdot lately that it's not good enough to simply like or support Thing A, but that part of that means trashing Thing B and disparaging anyone who thinks Thing B has any positive aspects at all. Why must I choose between Woz and Jobs? Why can't I highlight both? Or Ritchie and Jobs?

            I think Dennis Ritchie should be recognised for his massive cont

          • Re:That's why the world works. (Score:4, Insightful)

            by BasilBrush ( 643681 ) on Sunday October 30, 2011 @10:55AM (#37886432)

            We have a name for what Woz did. He was an engineer. Jobs was an entrepreneur and product manager.

            Woz was an extremely good engineer. I don't know that he was the best in the world. But for the sake of argument lets say he was.
            Jobs was a extremely good entrepreneur and product manager. I think probably the best in the world.

            Which is more important? Here on Slashdot a lot of people think Woz. Because there's a lot of engineers here. They idolise engineering and don't really like managers.
            On sites filled with entrepreneurs, product managers or designers, they'd say Jobs was the more important.

            My take is that there are plenty of talented engineers in the world. And in any case, Woz gave up back in the 1980s. The pinnacle of his achievement was the Apple II.
            Jobs as an entrepreneur and product manager was the best in the world at what he did. And he didn't stop after the Apple II. He went on to many more successful product developments, and moved Apple from near bankruptcy to the biggest capitalised company in the world in just 14 years.

            In my book Jobs was far more important than Woz. Woz is undoubtably a nicer guy than Jobs was, but that's rather irrelevant to a discussion on their influence and achievement.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AJWM ( 19027 )

              Apple was never near bankruptcy. Even as their stock was crashing, prior to bringing Jobs back, they had plenty of cash in the bank. The stock was severely undervalued on a strict capitalization basis, because the management was so horrible. (A few more years of that, and they might well have been close to bankruptcy.)

              Part of the success of Jobs' turnaround was just him applying his Reality Distortion Field to correct an already distorted reality. Of course, it was Jobs who brought in that management (

              • Apple was never near bankruptcy.

                “We were 90 days from going bankrupt.” -- Steve Jobs.
                They were so near bankruptcy they had to accept a $150 million bail out from their arch-competitor rival.
                http://thenextweb.com/apple/2010/06/02/steve-jobs-90-days/ [thenextweb.com]

                "Reality Distortion Field"? Were you determined to show that you're a hater who doesn't know what he's talking about? Was ignorance of the financial reality not enough for you?

                By the time Apple brought Jobs back, their market share had been falling for 5 years. It did of course take awhile to turn the ship around. But Mac market share has been growing again since around 2004. Obviously the point at which falling market share tuens to rising market share is the lowest point. Thus it's bound to happen during the tenure of the platform's saviour.
                http://fairerplatform.com/2011/07/apples-18-year-mac-odyssey/ [fairerplatform.com]

                Killing Mac clones, developing new Mac with high design standards, and creating OSX from NeXTStep were all parts of the way Jobs saved the platform. None of that is "Reality Distortion". It's reality. Real life success. Part of the bigger success that turned Apple from near bankruptcy to the largest company in the world in 14 years.

                Whether you like it or not.

          • I don't think he was. Woz certainly had the technical ability but most everything Apple is remembered for and importantly everything new they brought to the table of computing isn't technical really.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Genda ( 560240 )

            This is a truly confused conversations. Stop comparing apples to atom bombs. Steve J. was a fine example of a business man. Not an inventor (though inventive), not an engineer (though he had an interesting vision for technology) and a fascinating mix of contradictory elements. There is good evidence that he was bipolar, which is consistent with the strong likelihood that about 80% of the greatest creations of humanity were created by bipolar people in their manic phase. Pixar, Next, Apple all point at some

        • Steve Jobs made no such contribution to the modern computing era.

          Steve's contribution to the Amiga 1000 is the only good contribution to what could have been, but it was insignificant in itself.

          Steve's company has never introduced something radically new. Most of anything Apple has ever made, had already been made before them. That's not to say that the products weren't elegantly thought-through; they were just household objects that the majority of people could realy use to their (limited) full extend, as

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by wootest ( 694923 )

            Read the Steve Jobs biography and you'll see a few things that are direct results of Steve Jobs' ideas. The earliest example I can find is of his insistence on the fanless design of the Apple II which lead Rod Holt to create the first high-frequency switching AC power supply, but there are others.

            I'm not defending the outpouring of support for Jobs as proportionate, but I think it's interesting that a guy who could turn around an industry from creating products that appeal to people like you to creating pro

            • Good Lord,

              Switching power supplies have been around at least since the early 60's. Also for a long while 400Hz power was standard on all aircraft. The apple II in no way blazed any trail in power engineering. Now apple may have been the first to employ them in consumer-grade hardware for a small computer but let's not take any further than that.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by wjwlsn ( 94460 )

          I'm no fan of Steve Jobs, but I think it's reasonable to acknowledge his contributions. His particular talents seem to have been the imagination and insight required to identify and specify the attributes of devices that people would *want* to use, an unwillingness to accept anything less, and the charisma to make others share his vision.

          Don't get the idea that I'm some kind of Apple fanboy or Jobs-fawner. I pretty much despise Apple, and never liked Jobs. There are only two Apple devices even allowed in my

        • Not really, home computing is definitely significant, but it was Woz and the guys at PARC that ought to get the lion's share of the credit there. Woz for allowing for the Apple ][ to be produced at a price that people could afford and PARC for creating all the stuff that Apple ultimately ripped off for the Mac. Take away either of those and you probably wouldn't have Apple computers still on sale by Apple.

          Computing power was increasing, even without Apple, machines would have been powerful enough to run Uni

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jo_ham ( 604554 )

            That was my point though, and remember Steve's influence was not just at Apple - he had a major hand with NeXT, which was a big part in creating tools that were used by other people in the creation of the web as we know it (Berners-Lee, for example).

            And regarding Apple, while Woz was the technical genius, Jobs was his driving force - putting Woz into the right places at the right time to be able to really show that off. Neither one would have made it to where they were without the other (or without meeting

            • C and Unix not used initially at Apple (Score:4)

              by perpenso ( 1613749 ) on Sunday October 30, 2011 @02:02PM (#37887410)

              Jobs and Woz wouldn't be where they are without each other, nor would they be where they are without Ritchie (and a whole slew of other pioneers).

              The Apple II's OS was written in assembly. The original 3rd party development environments were assembly and BASIC. The Macintosh's OS was written in Pascal. The original 3rd party development environment was Pascal. C and Unix were not really involved in Apple's *initial* success.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by jo_ham ( 604554 )

                I was talking later for C's influence on things that Jobs was up to, for example at NeXT.

                • Fair enough for Apple 2.0 but Wozniak and Jobs are where they are primarily because of things that predated NeXT, Apple 1.0.

                • I was talking later for C's influence on things that Jobs was up to, for example at NeXT.

                  When he used Objective-C, the first version of C with objects that made it usable for advanced software?

          • Not really, home computing is definitely significant, but it was Woz and the guys at PARC that ought to get the lion's share of the credit there. Woz for allowing for the Apple ][ to be produced at a price that people could afford and PARC for creating all the stuff that Apple ultimately ripped off for the Mac.

            Absolutely. Of course without Jobs, Woz would have stayed a hobbyist computer builder employed at HP. And the guys at PARC (who didn't develop the GUI BTW) would never have been able to convince Xerox to release their work as a product for sale without "Jobs ripping them off" and actually working on the Lisa (and that doesn't even mention all the improvements made to the GUI at Apple). IOW most of us wouldn't even know about either of them.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MrHanky ( 141717 )

          Sure, but was Steve Jobs all that more important for the home computer revolution than whoever forgotten person was in charge of Commodore in the 1980s? After all, people bought $595 C64s and $699 Amigas for home use, not less capable Macs (compared to the Amiga) for several times the amount of money. Steve Jobs is remembered for his contributions to early home computing because of the success of the iPod and the number of fawning fanboys like yourself.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jo_ham ( 604554 )

            You're trying too hard, I can see the bridge you're standing under. 1/10.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by MrHanky ( 141717 )

              So you seriously think people would give a shit when Steve Jobs died if he didn't come back to Apple and release the iPod?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by djl4570 ( 801529 )
          The personal computer industry was already ignited in 1974 with the Altair 8800 and IMSAI 8080 in late 1975. The Apple I didn't come along until spring of 1976 and was a fart in the wind compared to the thousands of Altair and IMSAI units produced by then. Jobs and Apple added fuel to the industry with the Apple II in 1977 and I've always regarded Apple's contribution to software development as more significant than the hardware they produced in that era.

      • California had a day to recognize Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie had a much larger impact on the world at large than Steve did. Steve just was really good at PR.

        Absolutely true, but the best response to that is to roll your eyes at the idiots who came up with "Steve Jobs day", not to come up with days for everyone who had a larger impact than him. Einstein had more impact thn Steve Jobs or Dennis Ritchie, but he doesn't get a day as far as I know.

        • Einstein had more impact thn Steve Jobs or Dennis Ritchie

          [citation needed]

          Alexander Fleming [wikipedia.org] had more impact than any of them. In terms of absolute impact, Hitler also had more. The advances in emergency medicine, the Cold War and the moon race, along with the forced accelerated growth of technologies like VLSI, which gave us modern electronics, were all directly traceable to the consequences of having to squash that freak.

          • Fleming's discovery would have gone nowhere had not Florey and Chain worked out how to produce the stuff, and had not US chemical engineers worked out how to make it in volume. Hitler would not even be a footnote in history but for Napoleon and Peter the Great, and some truly foolish decisions made after WW1 by the victors. Personally I don't totally subscribe to the "Great man" theory of history. If Sculley hadn't messed up Apple, Jobs would today be known as a film exec.

            But K&R actually built somethin

            • I'm not belittling what Ritchie accomplished - quite the contrary, I think that c continues to be more important than any of the languages that have since been developed, and that unix will continue to be the gold standard for operating systems for at least another generation.

              Does this mean we should have a "day" for him? It's a free world - there's nothing stopping anyone from marking a day on the calendar as Dennis Ritchie Day. I don't expect it would get to the masses, any more than I expect people

              • I got the feeling both of these days where one-offs, not repeating...

              • Well, no, having "days" for people is a slightly strange idea when you think about it. But then I think naming buildings after people, or towns, is a bit odd too. I was more concerned to suggest that sometimes there really is a fork in history which is the work of just a small number of people, whereas elsewhere there's a kind of inevitability. The fork, of course, can be good or bad.

                Completely and utterly off-topic, had the Germans not had Hitler, for instance, the German military might have found another

                • I have the feeling that sometimes, an idea is inevitable because of a confluence of events/history, and that's why we often see the same idea invented or discovery made almost simultaneously by multiple people or groups.

                  In other cases, it really is a "one off" individual / event, like the Mule in Asimov's Foundation Trilogy.

                  I think, though, that personal computers were inevitable. All the original hobby computers came with unique operating systems (how much could you squeeze in with 4k of ram, after a

            • Re:Well..a bit more than that (Score:4, Insightful)

              by Broolucks ( 1978922 ) on Sunday October 30, 2011 @11:12AM (#37886538)

              Had Einstein not existed, somebody else would have come up with the Theory of Relativity shortly thereafter. It was just the next logical step in the development of physics. Similarly, had Ritchie not existed, all of modern computing would still work pretty much the same way it does now, using tools other people would have developed. Had Jobs not existed, Apple would probably never have got off the ground, an Apple lookalike would have come up a bit later instead, somebody else would have introduced multitouch devices, and so forth. Heck, if Walt Disney never existed, some other creations would have taken the available mindshare instead of Mickey and al. One must always keep in mind that when people invent or develop stuff, it reduces the incentives for others to redo the work. Worse yet, these people who might have done the job later on might have done it better - there was a need for a language like C, and had Ritchie not come up with C, a much better language might have taken its role. Or a worse one. We simply don't know. Basically, people deserve a lot of credit for their discoveries, but the impact of their discoveries is a poor barometer for these people's importance. The more impact a discovery has, the more likely it is that somebody will do it eventually.

              • So what you are esentially saying is.

                Shits complex.

                It really pisses me off that a lot off people do not get this. I know the human mind likes to break things down into nice boxes. But without realising there are no nice boxes this does not help.

          • [definition needed]

            How does define impact anyway?
            Lives prematurely ended?
            Enrichment of lives in one way or another?
            Lives saved?
            Political power or material gain?
            I need not go on. There can be no consensus here because we could not settle on what is meant by 'impact', so there seems to be little point in arguing over who has made impact on whatever.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cjcela ( 1539859 )
        Yes, but they appeal to a different demographics. Not everybody knows about Ritchie, or can understand how fundamental his contributions were; on the other hand, Jobs was a bit of a star for consumers in general, an iconic figure. Both of them made incredible things, thou. Setting up a day to recognise a single person is silly in a world with 7 billion people.

        • Which is precisely why Ritchie is in need of a day of recognition. The work he did was influential in a way that Steve Jobs can only dream of. Hell, even the products that Apple sells these days make heavy use of innovations from C and Unix.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by TheLink ( 130905 )
            But what's so great about C and Unix? There was stuff like Multics and Lisp before Unix. And Plan 9 and Smalltalk after.

            Maybe progress would have been delayed for a decade, but it's hard to say that the world would be such a worse place if C and Unix weren't around.

            Might even be better - from what I see there aren't that many C programmers who can safely write in C, but because of its popularity and performance they end up picking C.

      • I am not sure that is quite true. Bill Gates is the one that was 'really good at PR'. Not to belittle Steve. He was good too (indeed he may have learned from Bill because he got better as he went along), but Steve actually had a better idea. M$ has never had ANYTHING that wasn't stolen. Windows only exists because they copied the Mac (or tried to), and yet Gates seemingly had the ability to sell eyeglasses to a blind man. As for Dennis. Indeed, he is the one who deserves the praise, but were it not f

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gl4ss ( 559668 )

        according to dennis himself, he just did what any sane person would have done in his position, that he was just at the right place, tasked with the right task, at the right time, which is why he didn't go out making an ass out of himself every day yelling that he invented free as in freedom computing movement. and the people who were in that position, to work with advanced computers so early, was much, much more limited limited set of people than people who were later in the same position as steve(that mak

      • I think they both had a huge and equal impact on the world. It's just that you value Ritchie's more technical contribution as some value Steve's input.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • If we had days and events to recognize each and everyone who helped to make the world work, the world would not work.

      On the contrary, the Romans basically did this, and the result was ridiculous fun!

      Who cares if the world's going to shit when you have a festival (sometimes two) every single day!

      All hail Bacchus (and Dennis Ritchie)! Huzzah!

    • How about we just have a "Progress Day"?

  • i was thinking maybe a fund to help educate people would be a more fitting memorial ?

    how about a free e/book ?

    regards

    John Jones

  • Well... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by calexontheroad66 ( 975611 ) on Sunday October 30, 2011 @08:51AM (#37885814)
    People like good salesmen not people that work in unknown office spaces, regardless of their contributions.
    A public image is the luxury of those who don't have to labour, and so can afford to put their efforts into selling their ideas and themselves.
    Dennis Ritchie was a giant within his tribe, RIP.

  • dmr (Score:5, Informative)

    by amanicdroid ( 1822516 ) on Sunday October 30, 2011 @09:18AM (#37885928)
    Today we come to slashdot not to piss on the memory of appliance designer Steve Jobs but to celebrate a true computer scientist and engineer dmr.

    He was not a boisterous man or one too proud and busy to assist various teenagers on the internet who now wish they'd archived those emails. He was able to admit his greatest works were flawed. And perhaps most importantly, the man could create excellent documentation.

    To commemorate dmr is to commemorate ourselves as his ideas still hold sway. He lives on in the constantly modified code base. His DNA remaining as his direct additions are slowly dropped from the source while his patterns remain.

    ALL HAIL ELDER GOD OF COMPUTING DMR, MAY HIS LANGUAGE AND OS LIVE ON UNTIL WE ADOPT SOMETHING BETTER

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by RDW ( 41497 )

      At St. Paul's Cathedral, London, there is no elaborate memorial for its architect, Christopher Wren, who is buried there. Instead there's a simple Latin inscription that notes that he lived 'not for his own profit but for the public good' and ends with 'Reader, if you seek his monument - look around you.'

  • Really? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mlingojones ( 919531 ) on Sunday October 30, 2011 @09:21AM (#37885948) Homepage

    Am I missing something here that says we have to compare all these people on the merits of their accomplishments?

    Steve Jobs did great things. Dennis Ritchie did great things as well. We can argue all day about who was "better" or "more influential", but what's the point? Why not just celebrate their lives to honor them, instead of to passive-aggressively piss off people who look up to someone else?

    If you celebrate Dennis Ritchie, do it for his monumental contributions to computing. If you do it just because you think Steve Jobs got too much attention, you're doing a disservice to both of their memories.

    • Thank you.

      You know, I'm sad that John McCarthy just died, with hardly a mention at all here, and I'm not out to piss off all the Dennis Ritchie fans just because I got my panties in a bunch. Some people need to grow up.

    • Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Sunday October 30, 2011 @09:50AM (#37886078) Journal

      Am I missing something here that says we have to compare all these people on the merits of their accomplishments?

      No, you're not missing it, because it's not there. The summary and article say nothing of the sort.

      What they do point out is that if we hadn't been somewhat sensitized to it because of annoyance at the media reaction to Jobs' death, we likely wouldn't have paid nearly as much attention as we have to Ritchie's passing. This isn't a question of comparing Jobs and Ritchie, it's just pointing out that we often don't recognize the accomplishments of the people who really changed the world, but did it quietly.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 0racle ( 667029 )
        Media recognizes people in media. You recognize people in your office. The world kinda works like that.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Am I missing something here that says we have to compare all these people on the merits of their accomplishments?

      How can the level of recognition you get not be a de facto comparison? It's not whether about you give your grandkids $50 or $500 for Christmas, it's that you gave $50 to one and $500 to the other. And the response is like "Giving $500 is crazy, but if you gave it to Steve then Dennis damn well deserves the same." I feel that is a logical and natural reaction, by breaking the scale with Jobs you are changing the expectations for everyone else.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )

      How much attention somebody received immediately following their death is almost invariably based much more heavily on their fame in life than on the merits of how much people were positively impacted by the things that person actually did during their life. In general, the latter only tends to become more recognized by later generations, and not the one that actually was personally involved with the individual.

      You are right though... it is silly to compare them.

    • The problem I have isn't in celebrating either of these two gentleman's lives. My problem is with the media not doing their damn jobs. My problem is with gushing inaccurate reports about what Steve Jobs achieved. The passing of a technology giant has been largely ignored by a incompetent media obsessed with celebrity.

      I'm not going to bother celebrating Mr Jobs, but I wont begrudge others doing so privately or with their friends. Your iPhone being the way you like it is probably in part a result of his stewa

  • It is a nice idea, I suppose... But why Oct 30? Is it just because his birthday (which is in September) is too far away, and we'll forget him by then?

  • Recognition vs. Relevance. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Sunday October 30, 2011 @09:36AM (#37886018)

    "...the inequality in the public recognition of the people who really make their world work."

    You're joking, right?

    When a surgeon saves the life of a loved one, no one EVER walks right past the doctor to make a phone call to thank the inventor of plastic, blended steels, or surgical procedures. I don't even have to wonder how many surgically-enhanced women walking around these days have EVER thought to thank the inventor of silicone, because the answer is likely zero.

    And the same thing should be expected in damn near any other industry. Most of us probably owe our lives to some scientist or inventor, yet you've probably not even bothered to know who it is, much less give them any recognition, living or dead.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Haha, that's an awesome analogy, and it's so very true.

      While the contributions Ritchie made are ubiquitous and crucial, there's a much greater disconnect between him and the end users. Steve Jobs had a direct connection between his inventions and end users.

  • How can it be a bad thing for Steve Jobs' death to have brought increased awareness of Dennis Ritchie's contributions? Assuming, that is, that there's ANY connection between the two. It doesn't have to be a competition.

  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Hilleman [wikipedia.org] The guy develops loads of vaccines include 8 of the 14 currently recommended. Some how they forgot to give the guy the Nobel prize in medicine. Seems like it's long overdue. (I mean he's got a couple of buildings with his name on them but nothing that would tell anybody that he probably saved the lives of tens to hundreds of millions of people.)

  • ...and there's nothing wrong with that. The point to me wasn't so much about 'who was better or more influential', it was clearly about the fact that mass media was utterly swamped, to the point of nausea on my part anyway, with Jobs 'retrospectives' and commentaries. Celebrating that this other man who so recently passed was in many ways more influential on the 'guts' of IT, ostensibly what the readers on slashdot would care more about, is neither disrespectful to Jobs or out of place in any way.

    • The ironic thing is there are only two sentences about Dennis Ritchie in the summary. The rest of the paragraph is entirely about Steve Jobs. It is all about Steve Jobs. Why not make a day for John McCarthy?

      The fact that even Steve Job haters feel a need to react to his death shows the outsized influence the man had, for whatever reason.

  • Obituary in The Guardian (Score:4, Informative)

    by Kupfernigk ( 1190345 ) on Sunday October 30, 2011 @10:32AM (#37886308)
    Dennis Ritchie obit [guardian.co.uk]

    OK, a number of people contacted the Guardian before this, but however it happened they got the point and gave him a full page on the Saturday edition. I hope that goes some way to make up for Google having to help rescue Bletchley Park.

  • On Dennis Ritchie: A conversation with Brian Kerni (Score:4, Informative)

    by mikejuk ( 1801200 ) on Sunday October 30, 2011 @10:56AM (#37886440)
    This has just appeared: On Dennis Ritchie: A conversation with Brian Kernighan [oreilly.com]

    • One day something set me off, and I was wondering how the name "cron" was chosen. Wikipedia credited Brian Kernighan with creating cron, so I took a chance and emailed him. He responded and said he thought it was derived from chronos.. but that he didn't write it and didn't know why Wikipedia credited him. He said it was probably Ken (Thompson), Dennis, or Bob Morris.

      So I emailed Ken and Dennis at what email addresses I could find for them, I couldn't find Bob's email.

      Dennis emailed me back and said that

  • He's just refactoring.

  • better idea (Score:3)

    by uvajed_ekil ( 914487 ) on Sunday October 30, 2011 @12:36PM (#37887006)
    2day should be another SEVE JOBS day instead cuz he gave us all da ipodz!!!

  • In other words, the internet has a guilty conscience for expressing such a sad display of blubbering over Jobs, a man who was well known to be a world-class selfish asshole regardless of any accomplishments under his belt.

    I think it's disrespectful that suddenly so many people are showing such mock interest in a man who they normally wouldn't give a shit about. What a ridiculous society we live in, that they use a man's death to justify prior overreactions.

    If every important technology figure who dies from

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