Seen on the street in Kyiv.

Words of Advice:

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

“The Mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” -- The TOFF *

"Foreign Relations Boil Down to Two Things: Talking With People or Killing Them." -- Unknown

“Speed is a poor substitute for accuracy.” -- Real, no-shit, fortune from a fortune cookie

"If you believe that you are talking to G-d, you can justify anything.” — my Dad

"Colt .45s; putting bad guys in the ground since 1873." -- Unknown

"Stay Strapped or Get Clapped." -- probably not Mr. Rogers

"The Dildo of Karma rarely comes lubed." -- Unknown

"Eck!" -- George the Cat

* "TOFF" = Treasonous Orange Fat Fuck, A/K/A Dolt-45,
A/K/A Commandante (or Cadet) Bone Spurs,
A/K/A El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago, A/K/A the Asset., A/K/A P01135809

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Forget About Steve Jobs

Dennis Richie has died. He created the C programming language and he was a co-creator of Unix.
Posted by on or about 17:03

9 comments:

Sarah said...

RIP( int *this ) {
this++;
}

10/13/2011 8:17 PM
North said...

void*

10/13/2011 8:36 PM
Mark Rossmore said...

Jobs changed computers. Ritchie changed the world.

10/13/2011 11:51 PM
BadTux said...

Sarah, function prototypes didn't arrive until the mid 1980's, long after Ritchie had moved on to Plan 9. Ritchie's C was like this:

int RIP(s)
char *s;
{
printf("Sadness is %s\n",this);
return 0;
}

C also did not originally have voids, those are another mid 80s innovation done as part of the ANSI "C" effort. Dennis was busy on Plan 9 by that time, but AT&T Bell Labs was in the midst of disintegrating so nothing ever really came of Plan 9.

Yes, I'm old enough to have programmed in the original K&R C :). I never did meet Dennis himself, but that's because I hadn't become a migratory penguin yet at that time.

If there was any justice in the world, Ritchie's death would be the entire front page of the San Jose Murky News tomorrow and Steve Job's death would have been a minor footnote in the business page, "marketing whiz dies". So it goes. We are such a shallow nation :(.

- Badtux the Elderly Geek Penguin

10/14/2011 1:35 AM
Eck! said...

In my collection of manuals and stuff
is an original copy of the C language
report in the 8.5x11 three hole punched format with Bell Labs covers.
Besides being given to me by Dennis it also has notes of his in it.

We had a chance to talk back then (this was at Bell Labs Murray Hill spring 1980) and we talked about software innovations, C and Unix ports to new machines including the then pre-PC micros like the Z80. He was a very practical man, scientist and his comments on C were it's a replacement for the PDP-11 assembler. Every addressing mode especially pointers and auto increment were right out of the PDP-11s instruction set and addressing. Hence to us old timers C is a very close to the machine language in a world where other languages hide the machine completely.

Thanks Dennis.

Eck!

10/14/2011 7:32 AM
Sarah said...

Good to know, BadTux. I had forgotten K&R C didn't have the prototype shorthand.

C has always been my favorite language for non-numeric programming - it has a conciseness that I've always tried to not mess up with inelegant code. C++ ... just the opposite.

I see the NY Times has a nice obit now.

10/14/2011 9:31 AM
Sarah said...

Ok, this obit is even better. Apparently the press is waking up to who dnr was. Check out the link to his web page at the bottom.

10/14/2011 9:46 AM
BadTux said...

Cool story, Eck. I was amused when I learned PDP-11 assembly language (around the same time I learned "C") to find that most of the language was just a thin shell over PDP-11. I called it the world's fanciest macro assembler at that point. Which isn't all bad, if you're trying to fit your whole program into a 16-bit address space :).

Lately I've been programming mostly in Java, a many-times-removed bastard child of "C", or in Perl, a twisted aggregation of pretty much all of Unix into one computer language, as well as in some C and C++ of course. None of this would have happened without Dennis deciding to write that "fancy macro assembler".

-Badtux the Geek Penguin

10/14/2011 10:54 AM
Eck! said...

AS someone that can still code in PAL-8 (PDP-8)
and has one to run it as well as an assortment of
PDP-11s its well understood.

I'm an old assembler user, and still do embedded work. C is the ultimate macro assembler.

However, fitting C to Z80 and other micros makes for some funny code. The lack of the addressing modes really shows and inflates the resulting code.

IF you can't say it in K&R C well..


Eck!

10/14/2011 1:00 PM

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