
Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On - duck
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/thedennisritchieeffect/
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icandoitbetter
I feel very uncomfortable with the constant comparison between Ritchie's death
and Jobs' death. Even Rob Pike ended up doing this. [1] Why are we trying to
create conflict and see injustice where there is none? The amount of media
coverage a person gets has no correlation with his importance. Can we blame
people for not knowing him? Don't give me the tired "everybody is using his
software, so everybody should know about him" argument. It's so hypocritical.
We use a lot of things whose inventors we don't know.

[1]
[https://plus.google.com/101960720994009339267/posts/33mmANQZ...](https://plus.google.com/101960720994009339267/posts/33mmANQZDtY)

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abhimishra
Despite the pissing wars, I don't think it's that anyone is looking to 'create
conflict', since I'm betting most people who respected Ritchie also respected
Jobs. Rather, I'm guessing it's that everyone who is making statements similar
to Pike's sees a 'hardcore scientist guy' ignored next to a 'well-marketed
guy', and they are very uncomfortable with that (despite the fact that both of
them were more than the stereotypes I'm calling out here).

As for the argument you are calling 'tired', I respectfully disagree.
Certainly we use a lot of things whose inventors we don't know - but Ritchie's
work was remarkable in that it was fundamentally deeply technical (in a way
that is appreciable to hardcore CS folks), extremely wide in scope (in a way
that affects people from every walk of life), and recent-enough to warrant
more attention from today's society.

As for media - is it really OK for media (and by extension, society) to ignore
a person with that kind of impact? I personally feel it shouldn't be
culturally acceptable because that breeds a society where hard-science and
scientists are not in the public consciousness (ahead of, for example, many
random celebrities). Ultimately, the effect of that is more systemic IMHO (few
scientists in politics, lots of politicians who can freely ignore science,
reduced funding for fundamental scientific research, and so forth).

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philwelch
If it makes anyone feel any better, I don't think Steve Jobs was all that
interested in his personal celebrity. He was intensely private and only ever
made public appearances to promote Apple and its products, and he only did
that because he was the best at it. It's the rest of society that made him
into a folk hero for what he did, and the fact is our society undervalues
technical people like Dennis Ritchie.

As far as important people whose deaths went largely unheralded, the death of
Norman Borlaug a couple of years ago is another great example.

~~~
dhimes
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug>

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pessimist
I don't think this is the correct way to think of things. I think there are 2
different cultures that have contributed to the computing world today. The
first is from academics and big company research. This is the legacy of IBM
and AT&T Bell Labs - hackers wearing ties.

The second is tha hacker culture of Woz, Gates and the rest who developed the
PC, brought the rarefied computing of AT&T and IBM to the masses. I dont think
its fair to say that the latter stood on the shoulders of the former, as much
as they had their own unique contribution.

~~~
jmj42
I agree that there are two different cultures at work here. One, that of PARC
and Bell Labs, was foundational. The other, of MS and Apple, are
transformative.

It is with the foundational work of folks like dmr that the 80s era computing
companies were able to gain traction in the first place. Don't misunderstand,
I'm don't mean to lessen the importance of the contributions Jobs has made to
the computing industry, but he didn't live in a vacuum.

The idea that Apple, Microsoft, others, were built on the foundations set down
buy the computing pioneers of the 60s and 70s is, perhaps, no more than
recognition, and respect to the importance of that foundational research.

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dbattaglia
In a place like here (hacker news), the passing of Ritchie is obviously a very
big deal. But I'm not surprised that my mom (for example) doesn't know who
Ritchie was, regardless of how many devices and applications she uses written
and designed in C. Hell, I'm not even sure every software dev out there knows
the history of C, to be perfectly honest. But that doesn't take anything away
from the amazing things Ritchie did for technology and mankind.

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Uchikoma
If you take an iPhone, it has so many thing invented by people, this article
does not make any sense to me.

Someone invented wireless communication, someone plastics, someone metal,
someone thin glass, someone a touch screen, someone RAM, someone a CPU,
someone transistors on a lower level, someone invented software, someone
icons, someone wrote an email client for the first time, some invented the
machinery to build this, someone "invented" power, someone invented WLAN, some
invented the battery, someone invented circuit boards, ...

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InclinedPlane
Sure. But if you try to find commonalities amongst all those sub-components
and dependencies you find that a great many of them carry back to dmr. Whereas
the only comparable commonalities for things such as plastics and whatnot
would tend to be scientists working hundreds of years ago.

More so, dmr's work probably has had a more direct impact on the design and
construction of the iphone than the inventor of wifi or a particular plastic
or what-have-you. Likely any of those inventions would have merely been
invented by others. The same cannot necessarily be said for unix and C. We
would have something else, certainly, perhaps we would even have something
better, but the fact that dmr's imprint still remains on operating systems and
languages is rather remarkable.

~~~
Uchikoma
I'm sure, if C was not dominant, the iPhone could have been written say in
Pascal. There is nothing specific in C that makes it a requirement for the
iPhone. The same goes for operating systems.

Regarding the imprint: No user will see an imprint of C in his iPhone, and the
applications could be written in Pascal to the same iPhone APIs.

(not to dimish Ritchie work which I really like)

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tmcb
I found the article to be quite informative and, why not, just. Readers that
are not acquainted with hacker culture will be able to know who Dennis Ritchie
was and comprehend his importance after reading it.

Moreover, it is not one piece of the 'sad elitism' that took place after the
news about dmr arrived. I saw some dozens of comments splattered over
different places following the line 'you must definitely know who he was,'
accompanied by some generic complaint about unfair coverage by news media over
Mr. Jobs passing. Though I agree with some of these views, I don't think it
makes the fair eulogy Dennis Ritchie deserves.

Dennis' importance will never be measured by any kind of comparison or
relativization; it is hugely obvious, it persisted and is going to persist by
many decades. We here know it. Those who don't, though, have the right to
understand what he made possible. I think the article succeeds on this
purpose.

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benreesman
for a piece intended for a general audience I think the author did rather
well, I can imagine a nontechnical person appreciating the world in a broader
way having read it.

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recoiledsnake
>Windows was once written in C

Isn't Windows still in C/C++ ? Not to mention Office, Windows Phone, XBox....

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InclinedPlane
Predominantly it is.

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acqq
Early Apple computers used BASIC and assembly, Apple Lisa and early Apple
Macintosh were Pascal oriented... Steve Jobs did just fine without C and Unix.
It's true that there's Unix in OS X and iOS, but there there's Linux which
powers Google and most of the datacenters today, it's in Android and almost
any gadget you look at... and the article authors don't mention it because
then it wouldn't be in any way anything specific to Steve Jobs...

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aslag
Comments like this one show that Apple fanboyism knows no bounds.

One of the biggest contributers to the foundation of computer science and the
software industry (with respect to both concepts and implementation) has died
and we're talking about Steve Jobs again.

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epo
Steve Jobs is in the headline, so hardly off-topic. Perhaps anti-apple-
fanboyism knows no bounds.

