

Dennis Ritchie, the father of everything - blearyeyed
http://www.popolony2k.com.br/?p=2248

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walshemj
Of course Totally ignoring Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Von Neumann, Turing,
Shannon, Backus, Hopper, Flowers and many other giants.

And (this might be herasy) C ins't even a particularly good language when
compared to better designed ones like Fortran and Pl1/G.

And i think McCracken is a better language intro than K&R

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smutticus
> Von Newman

It's von Neumann. And it's pronounced more like Noy-Man.

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walshemj
TY Updated my post

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nsomaru
I just started reading K&R coming from a intermediate Python background.
Ritchie's style is both simple and engaging. End-of-section practicals are
labeled 'experiments', and the hacker spirit pervades the book.

Even better, the tools that I was implementing were useful and it was joyous
to use a pipe to redirect the program I had just written to perform a char
count hist on itself. How meta!

This may sound trivial for the numerous pundits and gurus who make HN their
haunt (salute!), but the feeling of joy and discovery is immediate, and the
suscpicion that I will walk away from this book a better coder
(:s/coder/thinker) is inescapable.

Ritchie's thoughts lives on, his body is just dead.

edit: %s/Richie/Ritchie/g

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hbgb
Dennis Ritchie is certainly an important figure that every computer scientist
should know about, but that post reads incredibly slowly and is filled with
grammatical errors. Looking at the author's other posts, it appears that
English is his/her second language, so I won't fault them for it.

Wired put out a nice, concise obituary soon after his death[1] and there are
many other great sources online about his life and influence. I would
definitely recommend reading up on him out if you don't already know much
about his life.

[1]
[http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/thedennisritchi...](http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/thedennisritchieeffect/)

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tonyplee
Agree!!!

Almost all the modern software stack's components are basically written or
build on top C code.

Linux, BSD, WinNT kernels are all build with on C.

gcc and all most all compilers, stdlib are written in C.

python, Java, PhP, lisp, smalltalk, NodeJS, are written in C.

Apache, Nginx source are written with C.

C++ is just add on layer to C.

Chromium, Firefox, webkit are all build on top of C/C++.

I haven't be able to find one core component in the modern OS/web stack that
is not base on C.

Can anyone?

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lispm
So that basically means there are security problems everywhere?

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innguest
If he's the father of everything, then he's to blame for everything being
worse than it could have been with Lisp.

He's the Thomas Edison of this story, and I'm with Tesla.

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vezzy-fnord
I don't think C is at fault here so much as the fact that register machines
are our primary model of computation.

Smug Lisp Weenies will be just that though.

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RegW
Goodbye World!

