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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.
9 comments:
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中國詞不評論，冒抹除的風險。僅英語。
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RIP( int *this ) {
ReplyDeletethis++;
}
void*
ReplyDeleteJobs changed computers. Ritchie changed the world.
ReplyDeleteSarah, 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:
ReplyDeleteint 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
In my collection of manuals and stuff
ReplyDeleteis 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!
Good to know, BadTux. I had forgotten K&R C didn't have the prototype shorthand.
ReplyDeleteC 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.
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.
ReplyDeleteCool 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 :).
ReplyDeleteLately 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
AS someone that can still code in PAL-8 (PDP-8)
ReplyDeleteand 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!