
printf("goodbye, Dennis"); - wahooligan
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/10/obituary-0?fsrc=nlw|newe|10-21-2011|new_on_the_economist
======
luckydude
As an old dude, been around since uucp was the only way we talked to each
other, was on the arpa net when we had the 11th IMP that connected people in
real time, I really can't honor Dennis enough.

He was the real deal, very quiet, very passionate about what he did, he wrote,
both in code and in papers, in a terse way that just got to the point.

If you have not gotten copies of the Bell Labs Technical Journals that have
all the Unix papers in them, you are in for a treat. Get them. Read them. They
wrote about what they did and wrote well. If all of us wrote that well the
world would be a better place. I've tried. It's not easy.

When you read those you'll grow to like Brian and Ken as well. There is a lot
of good there, I wouldn't hire anyone who had not read that stuff.

Bell Labs ought to be getting some loving here and we ought to be trying to
bring something like that back. It was home for Dennis and Brian and Ken and
Unix.

~~~
crag
I could not agree more. I remember reading about dmr and Bell labs back in the
Byte days; when Microsoft and Apple were radical and the tech world revolved
around IBM.

I can't stress enough how fundamental this man, his work and Bell Labs was to
our industry. These guys, they created the foundation that much of what have
today is built on.

------
bitops
"All operating systems know when they were born. Their internal clocks start
counting from then, so they can calculate the date and time in the future. It
is unclear whether it was Mr Ritchie or Mr Thompson who set the so-called
start Unix time at January 1st, 1970. That moment came to be known as the
epoch. Mr Ritchie helped bring it about. And with it, he ushered in a new
era."

Well said.

------
jfb
People who don't regularly read _The Economist_ probably ought to. It wears
its biases on its sleeve, and is the only place in the English language press
to find quality, in-depth coverage of parts of the world other than the Lower
East Side and the Isle of Dogs.

~~~
pradocchia
Let's not forget their stalwart support of war with Iraq in the lead-up to the
2003 invasion.

Well-written obits and cultural pieces are one thing. Propaganda to turn the
minds of Anglo-American movers and shakers is quite another.

~~~
rwmj
It's wasn't clear at the time (pre-2003) that it was going to end up as a
catastrophe. Furthermore the Economist always mentions now that they supported
the invasion -- they've never sought to hide the fact.

~~~
dextorious
Actually it was perfectly, perfectly clear, both that it would end up as a
catastrophe as well as the motives for having it

~~~
speleding
At the time it was far from clear that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of
mass destructions. In fact, there was ample proof he had used those weapons
previously on Kurds and American intelligence reports claimed he had more
where those came from (which turned out to be false, of course, but who knew).
There was no way to know that Bush would bungle the whole rebuilding phase and
let Iraq slide into anarchy.

Hindsight is always 20/20. At least they owe up to the fact that they changed
their opinion, I know lots of politicians who'd rather chose to rewrite
history instead.

~~~
pedrolll
Please don't write anarchy when you mean chaos.

~~~
speleding
When the Iraqi army was dissolved there was no recognized form of government
left, the very definition of anarchy. Chaos did indeed ensue.

------
pjscott
I am slightly bothered by the lack of a '\n'.

~~~
matthavener
Why?

~~~
Lukeas14
"\n" is a linebreak which would guarantee the text is printed and place
whatever output came afterwards on the next line.

~~~
derefr
Isn't the output stream at least guaranteed to be flushed once on completion
of the program, though?

~~~
djcapelis
Yes, it flushes completely outputting all characters. None of which contain a
newline.

Flushing doesn't automatically add newlines for you in C. It flushes the
buffers you gave it, it doesn't make new stuff up to print out along with your
buffers.

~~~
derefr
(Right, I didn't mean to suggest it added a newline; just that adding a
newline flushes the buffer, which was one half of the problem with missing a
newline—but that if this is the only line of the program, this half of the
problem is obviated.)

~~~
getsat
Adding a newline doesn't flush anything. You'd want to call fflush() to do
that.

~~~
bremac
printf prints to standard output, which is line-buffered by default when
reading from a tty on UNIX variants. This can lead to strange problems for
those who try to use it to track which parts of a program are being executed,
as demonstrated by the following program with an infinite loop:

    
    
      #include <stdio.h>
      int main(int c, char **v) {
        printf("Hello\nJello");
        while(1) ;
        return 0;
      }

~~~
getsat
Yes. You're not agreeing or disagreeing with me. Did you reply to the wrong
post?

Also, using printf() for debugging? In 2011? I seriously hope you guys don't
do this.

~~~
jimbokun
"Also, using printf() for debugging? In 2011? I seriously hope you guys don't
do this."

OK, I'll bite. I haven't done any serious straight up C programming in over a
decade, and yes, I used a lot of printf for debugging back then. What's the
best way to debug C programs now? (I imagine printf wasn't the best way to
debug programs when I was writing C, either.) A different logging library?
gdb?

~~~
getsat
printf() is fine if you just want to see if something is being run (assuming,
of course, you recognize the flushing caveat we're discussing).

If you're dumping printf()s all over the place to see exactly what flow your
program is taking at runtime, you're better off just setting a breakpoint or
two and using a debugger to quickly step through it.

------
ced
I'm curious about what a world without Mr. Ritchie would look like. What were
the popular alternatives to C and Unix in 1970?

~~~
shn
We would all be living in Windows (DOS?) hell. :)

Early in my career I was lucky to use Unix System V. I found those voluminous
unix manuals so natural. I could find anything came to my mind less than a
minute. Unix system was so coherent, so intuitive. I still enjoy unix prompt,
shell to this day.

His book "The C Programming Language" has been the best language book I have
ever read. So succinct, but so rewarding for those who studied diligently.
Such a beautiful book. I always took that thin book as a standard to compare
all the technical books I encountered. If it is that fat I thought there must
be something wrong with either the book or the subject of it.

In a broader context:

There was this article recently about Steve Jobs. In that it said somewhere
around 90 billion passed through this life and only a few could be able to
find his/her voice. Many died before his full potential could even be
recognized by themselves. I wonder what would world look like if those could
fulfill their talent to their maturity. Because not all societies of the past
allowed such liberty for many.

~~~
crag
Actually I'm not so sure about that. There was much debate at the time (when
Windows 3.11 was everywhere) whether it was a subset of UNIX.

At the very least, it was inspired by UNIX.

Where would we be? Probably all running VMS (which by the way runs on PC's).
Or maybe WangVS or something owned by CA now.

//edited for typos

~~~
4ad
VMS was a a reaction to UNIX, I'm not sure how different DEC's operating
systems would have looked if UNIX did not exist.

VMS runs on ALPHA and ITANIUM systems, it doesn't run on anything that vaguely
qualifies as a PC, unless you think Windows NT is a VMS variant. It's
certainly influenced by VMS, but I say it's a different product.

------
zerostar07
It would be pure class if wasn't for the late Mr. Jobs mention. Surely, one
can think of hundreds of more concrete examples that C enabled other than iOS,
like, i don't know, the Internet?

~~~
screwt
It does.

    
    
      "Linus Torvalds ... reinvented Unix for the internet age"
      "Unix-like systems power several hundred million Apple and Android mobile devices, most internet firms' server farms"
    

Given the massive amounts of attention shown to Jobs' death, mentioning him
gives the article sensible context (especially considering that most Economist
readers are unlikely to have hear of Ritchie).

------
abc_lisper
> Babbage used his first Sun Unix workstation at university in the 1980s

It says so in the article. Which Babbage are they talking about?

~~~
jfb
The blogger. It is customary at _The Economist_ to assign to a columnist as a
pseudonym the name of a foundational figure in whatever the column purports to
be about ("Lexington" for their USA coverage, "Schumpeter" for the coverage of
business, &c.). One person will write the column for a period, and then move
on.

~~~
abc_lisper
Ahh.. I see

------
sometimes
Is it wrong to wonder about Dennis' personal life? Did he marry, have kids,
take a lover? Like to garden, travel, read? He is such an important and
influential figure in the history of computing, but it feels like we know
little about him beyond his professional accomplishments.

~~~
johnx123-up
AFAIK, he's never married. He lost his interest in soccer too after sometime.
So he's steep geek with some interest to country music.

------
awflick
Its a bit sad but the obituary is often the best article in the economist. In
this case it was a very fitting tribute to a tech hero.

~~~
jfb
I disagree, but that doesn't mean that I don't turn to the obituary page
immediately on receipt of each week's issue.

jfb: bringing down the median subscriber income of _The Economist_ for 20
years.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I've helped drag down the median for about 10 years myself.

I wonder if their subscriber income stats aren't heavily bifurcated.

~~~
ireadzalot
I always felt weird doing this. Almost always I turn to their Obit page when I
get a new issue. Glad to know I am not the only one who does it.

~~~
eru
I usually start with the funny letter to the editor. (Usually the last letter
printed.)

------
ableal
Went down the wwww rabbit hole, found this current trove of Bell System
Technical Journal PDFs

<http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/>

------
6ren
If iOS was derived from Mac OS X, isn't it also a unix?
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS>

_EDIT_ thanks, misread it.

~~~
rodh257
yes, and the article mentions this twice

------
johnx123-up
AFAIK, he's against to AT&T split. Can anybody share some info on that?

------
rbanffy
I don't feel it's right to use printf where a simple puts would suffice.

------
MKT
RIP. Every time I type printf, I honor you, my friend

------
zwilliamson
epoch time has a new meaning to me.

------
ruffdev
Pure class from The Economist

------
makecheck
Unfortunate that they give Linus Torvalds so much praise for "reinventing
Unix" with Linux. It was at least substantially, if not equally, made possible
by projects such as GNU. Clearly the kernel was a huge and necessary part, but
it was just that: a part.

~~~
nobody3141
It was also made possible by cheap ubiquitous i386 PCs - so it was really all
due to the Microsoft monopoly

