Perhaps it's because I'm an old geek and can remember when V7 Unix was new and exciting, but in my mind Ritchie and Thompson loom larger than any of those other guys. The original design of Unix contains so many ideas that were radical, far from obvious, and turned out to be right, and more or less zero ideas that turned out to be wrong; it stands alone in my mind among the achievements of my profession. -Tim
On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 5:46 AM, Boris Liberman <[email protected]> wrote: > On 10/14/2011 10:15, Larry Colen wrote: >> >> Wednesday evening, on another mailing list I was pointed to a saddening >> post on Tim Bray's blog. Last week, Dennis Ritchie passed away. >> >> This news will almost certainly cause one of two reactions: >> "Who?" >> or >> Dismay that we have lost someone who has arguably contributed more to >> the world of computing than Jobs, Torvalds and Stallman combined. >> > > I think K&R was the very first professional book I read back in late 1980s > or early 1990s still living in Russia. I disagree with your following > comparison though, Larry. Each of these men made their fair contribution to > our world as it is today. To that end I see no sense to compare them. > > Like I could ask you - have you heard of late prof Amir Pnueli, the Turing > price holder, who happened to have invented Temporal Logic? Likely you did > not, but it does not make you any worse a man and him any less a scientist. > > Boris > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and > follow the directions. > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
