
The Enduring Legacy of Dennis Ritchie (2012) [pdf] - MrXOR
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~aho/Talks/12-09-07_DMR.pdf
======
Aloha
"Dennis also had a deliciously wry sense of humor. He was once asked: In your
experience, how long does it take for a novice programmer to become a
reasonably proficient C developer capable of writing nontrivial production
code?

Dennis replied: I don’t know. I never had to learn C."

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red-indian
For decades I have loved Ritchie's design aesthetic. Some years ago I met one
of his close family members without realizing it and we bonded over our love
of both classical studies and indigenous issues. At some point through random
chats I talked about what an influence Ritchie was on me. My friend was
shocked that I had heard of her relative whom her family considered as a
pleasant eccentric, and she was gobsmacked when I told her stories about him
that she had heard for countless years from the man himself over the holiday
dinner table which everyone had rolled their eyes at. The concept outsiders
had heard of him was astonishing. I was similarly amazed that my super smart
friend was so close to him. As time proceeded I became something of friends
with Dennis, not close, but someone he at least knew and we exchanged some
amusing letters and gifts.

When I called my friend to tell her that Dennis had passed away it was the
first she heard of it.

Not everyone likes Dennis' design aesthetic but it's been valuable to me in my
career to find someone else, someone well known, who had similar
predilections.

Dennis was genuinely a wonderful person who had excellent design taste. I miss
him though I can still meet with him any time I like by thumbing through the
K&R.

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temac
I 100% agree with the paper.

However, one should not mistake historical contributions with state of the art
needed today. Unix and C are still largely relevant and will continue to be so
for a long time, even more so their legacy, but one should not interpret that
as if nothing better is needed now. For Unix derivatives, well they evolved
and are already largely not the same thing as the historical versions. For the
C programming language, it is a way more complicated situation. Of course it
evolved too, but I would say not as much, especially in areas (safety) where
we now have pressent needs.

C has contributed greatly to the world and will continue so. But don't forget
that so does Cobol.

~~~
jchw
It also doesn’t signal that any of the options that exist today are not
better, too: switching costs are frequently underestimated.

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Merrill
The comments on the MIT approach versus the New Jersey style is interesting
considering that by '89 MIT's X Window System was a major contributor to the
success of Unix Workstations and the X Windows "Principles" seem a lot like
Unix'.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Principles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Principles)
and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better)

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mikece
"Small is beautiful" \-- combined with the principle that each program should
do one thing and do it well you the key to improving so many irrationally
ambitious software projects.

~~~
armitron
Except the way it's presented by Aho is farcical. Smalltalk is small and
beautiful. Forth is small and beautiful. Scheme is small and beautiful. C is
NOT small and beautiful. Unix is NOT small and beautiful.

Aho is going off the cliff here. To me this looks more like a no holds-barred
whitewashing than a eulogy. Richard Gabriel (to say nothing of the MIT crowd)
was absolutely right, and it's painful to see him so easily dismissed. We
should lament C and Unix being so prevalent today, not wear them like a badge
of honor.

~~~
abvr
Wait, saying both C _and_ UNIX aren't small and beautiful seems like one major
oxymoron. Care to elaborate on those? IIUC, both of them were created in a
small and concise design to perform tasks that most systems of the time failed
to hold up to. In fact, the very reason they've endured such long time spans
must be enough proof of their beautiful concise yet efficient design. Take any
language or operating system today, they just cannot design them without some
inspiration or functionality derived from C or UNIX.

Complexity today is insane, take Linux for example, but the darn thing works!
The original UNIX was the exact opposite of today's major operating systems in
a way, which was designed to perform tasks based on the UNIX philosophy. Linux
or any other OS today take complexity to levels the creators of UNIX never
foresaw and is one of those aspects they wish today wasn't done. But the world
itself has changed since the 70s, and so has Linux too, evolved into having
thousands of system calls, whereas the original UNIX had 20.

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macintux
> At the insistence of Doug McIlroy, the early Unix systems had on-line manual
> pages making the system much easier to learn and use.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite parts of the early UNIX story, the fact
that adding the “BUGS” section to man pages was motivation to fix the bugs
instead of documenting them. Shame is a powerful motivator.

------
wildduck
The requested URL was not found on this web server:
/~aho/Talks/12-09-07_DMR.pdf

~~~
dspillett
Working fine here. Do you have any DNS level blocking going on for which that
server could be a false positive? Alternately (but probably less likely) they
may be moving things around and a DNS change hasn't propagated to your
upstream resolvers yet. What address does the server name resolve to at your
location?

Could also mean they have multiple addresses for that name and not all of them
point to a host with that file. I'm not in a position to try check that ATM.

~~~
zamadatix
A 404 is a server side error.

~~~
tonyarkles
All of the things outlined could result in them asking for the document from
the wrong server.

Works fine here too.

~~~
zamadatix
DNS blocking doesn't result in a random server being chosen to get a 404 from
it results in a connection error. Works fine for me as well, I'm just pointing
out the 404 error didn't come from blocking the server.

~~~
tonyarkles
If it's redirecting to 127.0.0.1 or a local LAN IP or a local proxy or... lots
of things that _could_ cause a 404 resulting from confused DNS.

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nintendo1889
What a sublime and witty joke.

