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>Even though I never met or knew Ritchie I still feel bad when I read about his death, when I was a teen I would go in rabbit holes reading about C and Unix, and would read about all the design decisions he made and the rationales for it, a true loss for the programming world.

sounds a lot like me, even I still read docs related to old school UNIX and C to this day

>The concepts of minimalism and modularism are being thrown away and it shows in the performance and stability of new software. It's a shame we have to learn the same lessons over and over.

why though? is coding huge monolithic software easier to do rather than creating a set of modular and simple tools?


Yes, creating a monolith is usually easier and faster. It is also the wrong thing to do, more often than not. As they grow and mature, properly designed modular systems can be easier to debug, maintain, test, deploy, and document.


Their works still live among us, if anyone tried to look close enough, they would still see their names all over it


I'm assuming bells labs no longer has the financial backing of a monopoly like AT&T that they had 40 years ago?


It was cleaved off AT&T as part of Lucent and then merged with Alcatel. Part of the problem there was that it was never clear if Lucent merged with Alcatel or if Alcatel acquired Lucent. The whole company was pretty dysfunctional but nothing too unusual there.

Nokia came along flush with MS money from the sale of their handset business to buy Alcatel Lucent and got Bell Labs for free. Neither company was doing particularly well flogging network gear and together they didn’t do much better.


I suppose even if they had the funding the company itself is at it's value extraction phase.


They are now owned by Nokia.


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