

Dennis Ritchie passes away at 70 (2011) - disgruntledphd2
http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/13/father-of-c-and-unix-dennis-ritchie-passes-away-at-age-70/

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farinasa
Assuming the point is that we focus too much on big personality rather than
actual contribution, this is something that bugs me and I think about often.
Ken Thompson is still around. So is Bjarne Stroustrup. Linus Torvalds is still
heading the linux project. We need to celebrate these people. There are a ton
of them and even as an enthusiast, I don't know who they all are and I'm
ashamed. Most regular people haven't even heard these names and probably don't
care to. Hell Stallman probably deserves a nobel prize for GNU.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Every industry has those people, though. With seven billion people in the
world, there are going to be a _lot_ of incredibly amazing people that we will
never hear of, just because the bandwidth it would take to even hear their
names (much less really understand their contributions) is just far too great.

Even though there are millions of outstanding contributors to our societies
and technologies whose names I will never know, I am grateful for them.

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kevinh
This would have been much more poignant had:

1) This been posted on October 12th

2) We were still discussing the anniversary of Jobs' death on that date.

As it is right now, of course people are discussing the death of Jobs and not
Ritchie _because people don't usually talk about the 358th day since someone's
death_.

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mherdeg
I think the submitter is making the point that we seem to have forgotten about
Ritchie but have managed to remember the one-year anniversary of Steve Jobs's
death.

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Thrymr
That's fine, but I don't recall seeing any of the recent Jobs anniversary
posts worded in the present tense. The title is just confusing. I was well
aware of it at the time, but I had to think for a second because something in
my brain was telling me that someone _else_ had died, since Ritchie had passed
away a year ago. I feared for Ken Thompson for a moment there.

[Edit: the date was not in the title originally as it is now.]

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mherdeg
I think people occasionally submit present-tense articles for past events to
try to make some very specific kind of point, sort of like a "have you
forgotten?".

It's a bit bewildering and I'm not totally sure I understand the point.

The one that comes to mind recently was a 6 September 2012 submission with
headline "Swedish rape warrant for Wikileaks' Assange cancelled" linking to
the article <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11049316> from 2010.

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rhizome
It's lazy and passive-aggressive, the implication being, "figure out why this
is relevant."

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throwa
Someone made this comment on Techcrunch and it sums up the impact of Ritchie's
work:

Without Ritchie, we would not have iOS for the iPhones, the Mac operating
system and no basis for Java within the Android phones. No basis for Python
and Ruby since they are written in C. Linux stood on the shoulders of Unix,
just as Steve Jobs/Apple stood on the shoulder of many giants and this man was
one of those giants. We lost a great tech leader. His impact was huge!, as
billions of dollars was made releasing products that benefit from his work but
he wasn't a billionaire, but impact is more than money.

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Empro
Just in case you're confused, this article was published on October 13, 2011.

~~~
stephanerangaya
Yeah, that's what I thought.

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ctdonath

      free(DennisRitchie); /* If ptr is a null pointer, no action occurs. */

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Thrymr
In 2011.

