Inventor of C Dennis Ritchie Honored With Second Death (cnet.com) 91
An anonymous reader writes: Dennis Ritchie invented the "C" programming language, so a second round of honors comes as no surprise. Although five years ago he passed away, some confusion over a tweet started the social media avalanche known as "second death syndrome". The problem, especially if you look at it from Ritchie's perspective, is that he's been dead for five years -- exactly five years. That time gap seems to have escaped some of the biggest names in tech, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who late Wednesday tweeted out Wired's five-year-old obituary on Ritchie, thanking him for his "immense contributions." Om Malik, a partner at True Ventures and the founder of tech site GigaOm, retweeted Pichai's tribute before soon recognizing his mistake and tweeting an apology for "adding to the confusion and noise." Craig Newmark, founder of the popular online bulletin board Craigslist, also paid his respects, saying, "this guy made a huge contribution to the world."
honorary slashdot second story posting... (Score:5, Funny)
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5-year-old news is Slashdot's speciality.
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As long as we get spared an "Ask Dennis Ritchie".
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He'd still be more interesting to listen to than Shkreli.
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I can think of several questions for a Dennis Ritchie zombie process. The only think I would want to ask a living Shkreli is if he realizes he is a douchebag or is ignorant of this.
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He'd still be more interesting to listen to than Shkreli.
Who? Someone not even worth mentioning?
There's only one sane solution (Score:2)
They gotta dig him up and kill him again.
He was never really honored the first time around (Score:5, Interesting)
Given that his death was overshadowed in the public by the passing of Steve Jobs just a week earlier, I think he deserves a second death.
Re:He was never really honored the first time arou (Score:5, Insightful)
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Only in the sense that every god is an overhyped individual that turns out to be just another charlatan.
Re:He was never really honored the first time arou (Score:5, Insightful)
Wish I had mod points, he should have received 10x the number of accolades than Jobs. But I guess marketing always wins
Re:He was never really honored the first time arou (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as you believe all that matters is engineering, people will fail to utilize the technology that engineering can bring.
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Steve "the knife" Jobs (Score:2)
Nicely done. You just lumped Steve Jobs in with Arnold "the Knife" Morris.
The Pitchman [gladwell.com]
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Motorola did not have Intel beat. Motorola had nothing.
Moto did the 88K as its replacement for the 68K. While some architects like the 88K, it was a market failure.
IBM derived the PowerPC from its workstation line, developed three initial processor families, the 601, 603/604, and 620, and the gifted this work to Motorola so that PowerPC could claim to be a consortium with multiple potential processor design houses. The PowerPC NEVER had "Intel beat", it was explicitly designed to provide performance pari
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A whole lot of work went into this absurd analogy, none of it illuminating in any way.
The CISC/RISC argument in the earliest days revolved around CISC's inability to scale to higher IPCs. For a time, there were plenty of RISC processors that offered superior performance but none could overcome the x86 binary compatibility advantage. This compatibility provided investment that allowed Intel to keep x86 performance close, despite RISC predictions to the contrary, until Intel fully developed architectures th
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And if you believe sales is everything, it' just a bunch of guys selling rocks to each other.
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You sound like you're up for a promotion. Hope you'll be able to deal with the disillusion when you come to realize that upper management isn't what you think it's supposed to be. That in most not privately owned companies it's a way to dodge doing actual work with cluelessly spouting BS.
Steve and the rest of the world wouldn't have been where we're now if it weren't for a handful of brilliant people like Ritchie, Thompson, and Joy to name a few off the top of my head.
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Steve produced an awful lot of pretty things that flopped.
In fact, contrary to all the hype at the time the original iPhone was largely a flop, shifting a pathetic 6 million units, where even Nokia's run of the mill N95 broke 10 million. This was mostly because they failed to give the original iPhone the necessary engineering time for things that people had been expecting in their phones for years beforehand, such as GPS/mapping, MMS, apps and so on and so forth.
It wasn't until they allowed engineering to a
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If by "utilize" you mean "buy the shiny one from the gleaming white Apple store" then yeah, maybe... But it's not like Apple were the only ones bringing engineering to the masses, if by masses I mean "people who can afford a $1000 phone".
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It's a false comparison... Ritchie was *very* well known with computer guys; particularly programmers/developers... which Jobs hired many.
Jobs did what he did as a business, yet he also had a thorough understanding of the technologies involved; such as OOP- otherwise he wouldn't have had the rational in choosing Objective-C as a basis for his NextStep OS in the mid 1980's.. which eventually evolved into Mac OS X and iOS.
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I dispute that Ritchie is the father of modern computing.
The GP said "Ritchie is an undisputed father of modern computing", not the father. Seems there were several fathers.
I read the GP that wrong way too at first : "Father" is not a good analogy in the case of several founders.
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Especially since Steve Jobs in relative terms contributed almost nothing to the world
Except bring the world's first recognizable PC (hardware) to the masses with the first Apple. He also brought the windows model of UI to the masses too. I'm no fan of Apple, and never liked the reality distortion field around Jobs, but Jobs had drive and vision, and you need guys like that to harness the engineers.
while Ritchie is an undisputed father of modern computing.
His flavors of OS and language won out, both of which were based on previous designs. Calling him the "undisputed father of modern computing" is ridiculous.
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The =/= an. The GP indicated that Richie was one of the fathers, not the only one. I would add in Von Neumann, Turing, the NSA and NASA personally to the list, but there are many who contributed largely to the modern day computer and brought the whole technology we use daily into being.
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Even calling him "a" father is too much. His flavors won out, but they were not groundbreaking. I'd actually rate what Jobs accomplished higher.
Von Neumann and Turing, yup I agree. But I think the king is Douglas Engelbart, whose Mother of All Demos [wikipedia.org] defined modern day computing as we know it today, in 1968. He was 20 years ahead of his time.
Re:He was never really honored the first time arou (Score:5, Insightful)
Like any other time in life, average people care more about who's in front of the camera than who's behind.
Not that we can blame them. Out of sight, out of mind.
Re:He was never really honored the first time arou (Score:5, Interesting)
A week later, DMR passes, who was arguably a greater contributor than Jobs, yet no memorial appeared on Google's home page. One of the excuses given was that potential destinations for a memorial link wouldn't be able to handle the traffic. Even after being called on it during a company meeting, Google management remained unswayed.
I thought their handling of the affair was rather ad-hoc and sloppy -- not in line with the company's image at all.
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Rounded corners come and go, but pointers are forever....
I was angry that Jobs was receiving all the death press when DMR died. Dennis was a great, soft-spoken, man. Met him a few times. Had a beer with him at a Usenix hospitality suite many many years ago.
If any one tiny group of people are, from a "root cause" point of view, responsible for the amazing technology we are experiencing today, it would have to be
Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and Brian Kernighan. There is a *tremendous* a
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That's because despite all the supposed animosity in the news between tech companies like Google and Apple the reality is that the top tech CEOs are all best friends. Gates, Jobs, Schmidt, they all know each other and spend time with each other.
Ritchie wasn't a top tech CEO. Now I completely agree with you, but my point is that the decision wasn't made at Google based on contribution, it was made based on personal relationships at the top. Recognise that and it'll make a lot more sense.
Photos from 2010, at
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Given that his death was overshadowed in the public by the passing of Steve Jobs just a week earlier, I think he deserves a second death.
One thing many would want is to be remembered long after their death, Google gave Dennis Ritchie not only that honor but brought back Dennis Ritchie as a person of great importance.
C always did suck a garbage collection (Score:5, Funny)
We thought we cleaned that out years ago.
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/hat tip
That was very well played.
Re:C always did suck a garbage collection (Score:5, Funny)
*** glibc detected *** /dritchie/: double free or corruption
in defense of the eulogizers (Score:1)
. . . I must say that Dennis Ritchie DID make great contributions to computer science and he is still dead.
He didn't die. (Score:5, Funny)
We only deleted his pointer. So he's got a tombstone, but he's still alive. Little chance of finding him, though.
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This'll get him.
void *p;
p=(void *)0;
while (1) {
free(p++);
}
No, wait! I forgot about everyone else! ^C^C^C
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Thankfully this crashes very early on.
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The proper code is:
#include
#include
int main()
{
void *p = NULL;
signal(SIGSEGV,SIG_IGN);
signal(SIGBUS,SIG_IGN);
while (p)
free(p++);
}
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Here, lemme try it out and see if it wo
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ECODE failed... That's #include <signal.h> and #include <stdlib.h>
Technically the code is also improper, because it relies on undefined behavior.
We'll see this happen again. (Score:1)
Ritchie++ (Score:4, Funny)
Further proof (Score:1)
Twitter users are stupid motherfuckers.
crossed signals (Score:2)
The first one was SIGTERM and the second one was SIGKILL
Who? (Score:5, Interesting)
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..big is a bit subjective. I never heard of "Om Malik, a partner at True Ventures and the founder of tech site GigaOm" before, and I only know the third guy since he is the Craig in Craig's list.
Yeah, it's like an episode of "Slashdotting With The Stars".
I'm not dead yet. (Score:2)
Well, he's not dead yet.
Yeah, Barn. (Score:2)
Abe Vigoda finds this story very amusing.
So wait... is this a dupe? (Score:3)
Previous story [slashdot.org]
Is there a statute of limitations on duplicate stories?
Sad considering Ken Thompson works for google. (Score:1)
Sad considering Ken Thompson works for google.
"Second death syndrome"? (Score:2)
It makes it sound like a personal medical condition rather than someone else having a memory failure.
I guess it's just an aspect of fame\notoriety. You don't forget that someone you were personally acquainted with is dead, but someone you knew of but never actually met is a different matter.
Whew... (Score:2)
Off by one error (Score:1)
Warning! Autoplay! (Score:2)
The article links to a page with an autoplaying video, with sound, click at your own risk.