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.
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).
Not to mention that Steve Jobs was so much younger than Ritchie. It's always sad when a great innovator dies but its doubly sad when he dies young. Steve's kids are much younger than Daniel's and are unfortunate to have lost their father at such a young age. Same goes for his wife.
You're right and I winced when the Jobs comparison was made early in the article. I'm not sure that making comparisons to Jobs isn't the right thing to do even if it wasn't done well here. Jobs and Richie are both heroes to computing culture but after Jobs death we're left feeling that Richie deserves similar praise in the popular press, but unable to easily explain to the public that Dennis impact on the world was on the same level as Jobs'. Wired is a popular magazine now and needs a way to communicate Richie's impact to it's readers, so they use Jobs as a comparison.
This. It's completely nonsensical to chastise the public for mourning someone disproportionately. Had Dennis passed a year from now, would this article have been written? This reasoning slips into the unproductive paradigms that elitists subscribe to to feel better about themselves. Are Ritchie's and Job's legacies inseparable? Yes. Does that mean their work is to be valued by precedence? No more than the likes of Tesla and Edison.
I appreciate the insight to Ritchie's immortal legacy. But basing legacies on such logic quickly deteriorates into gibberish.
True, plus both contributed to technology in their own ways and I highly doubt either man cared much about their popularity status. Why can't we just pay homage to their individuality?
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.
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.
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.
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, ...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
[+] [-] icandoitbetter|14 years ago|reply
[1] https://plus.google.com/101960720994009339267/posts/33mmANQZ...
[+] [-] abhimishra|14 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] prayag|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schleyfox|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Radix|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] accoinstereo|14 years ago|reply
I appreciate the insight to Ritchie's immortal legacy. But basing legacies on such logic quickly deteriorates into gibberish.
[+] [-] rooshdi|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] partition|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pessimist|14 years ago|reply
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|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rhdoenges|14 years ago|reply
(that is, incidentally, my favorite photo ever)
[+] [-] dbattaglia|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Uchikoma|14 years ago|reply
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, ...
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tmcb|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] benreesman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] recoiledsnake|14 years ago|reply
Isn't Windows still in C/C++ ? Not to mention Office, Windows Phone, XBox....
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acqq|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aslag|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bcl|14 years ago|reply