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Comment by keidian | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. When I first found out about dmr, I really really hoped the stories will flood in here after the massive Steve Jobs amount. Not to take anything away from Steve, but dmr is far more important in my opinion, and I'm sure many other geeks would agree. I'm glad he isn't just quietly being forgotten like I feared he would.

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Let's not compare the two legends. They made their own marks in vastly different ways. Both magnificent. I love them both. RIP.

Lets compare HNs reaction over them two.

Steve Jobs: Two days full frontpage of crying and "I remember him like this like that" and "wish I could have had the time to suck his penis"

Dennis m Ritchie: One post, most comments discussing relation of news to Steve Jobs.

Great going HN.

Just for the historical record, at 8:00am EST there are 12 stories on the front page about Ritchie's passing.

I think Steve Jobs's passing away was a bigger shock to people because the memory of him and his accomplishments was/is very fresh in people's minds. He was the CEO of Apple till just over a month ago.

It's like finding out a friend passed away and "I just met him last week..."

DMR created. SJ inspired.

let's not compare both.

let's not compare both.

Ah yes, the cognitive dissonance of an Apple fanboy developer who knows that C is far more important than anything SJ ever did yet can't reconcile that with their belief that SJ was god.

Shame on Hacker News's audience that the front page isn't filled up with Dennis stories right now.

Your comment reeks of fanboyism much more. Don't litter the frontpage posts on our heroes with bitter comments please.

Don't litter the frontpage posts on our heroes

Speak for yourself. Steve Jobs was not my hero. I respected him but did not like him one bit.

Our heroes = Your hero (Richie) + my heroes (Richie, Steven)

I usually spell a hero's name right.

grats

I love dmr. nobody's questioning dmr's contributions to computer science and technology. I love them both.

  > C is far more important than anything SJ ever did

That's like saying the paintbrush is far more important than the paintings of Michelangelo or da Vinci.

We don't have one historical person who invented the paintbrush. It's prehistoric probably. But we do have Ritchie.

And yes, ge gots to be far more important because he's first in the food chain. He invented the paintbrush and went on inventing the art itself.

A paintbrush is indeed far more important than the painting of Michel Angelo or da Vinci from an historical point of view.

On top of that, there are thousands of programming language today, many relying deeply on concepts and paradigms that are much younger than C itself, but C remains one of the most used languages. Not only C is very much used, it's still the only option in many cases and it is by far, the language that is most used to implement other languages, or at least to bootstrap them.

Considering the age of the paintbrush comparing to, say, spray ink, your analogy is in fact, not only valid, but a very good one.

No, it's like saying the invention of the paintbrush is more important - and frankly, it is.

No, it isn't. Da Vinci used a paintbrush to paint. Steve Jobs did not use C to program, because he never wrote any code or even designed anything according to at least one verifiable source[1].

It's more like saying the paintbrush is more important than anything some really successful art dealer ever did.

http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/steve-jobs-never-had-... (the book mentioned in the blog post, not the post itself)

There's no shame, there just aren't the same type of stories about Dennis. Ritchie was a hacker, he created amazing things that were ahead of their time which have enabled a great many developers to build amazing things (including essentially the entirety of the infrastructure of the internet and the web). But so much of Ritchie's work was enabling and mentoring rather than directing and guiding (which was more Jobs' MO). How many tens of thousands of developers were enabled to do amazing things by Unix or C? How many developers had moments of inspiration and enlightenment as reading through K&R enabled them to achieve a higher level of sophistication in their programming skills? But how many of those examples make for good storytelling?

I meant "stories" in the journalistic sense.

Shame on Hacker News's audience that the front page isn't filled up with Dennis stories right now.

Right now 14 of the top 15 stories are about Dennis Ritchie.

Yeah, that wasn't true when I made that comment earlier. I'm happy that the community seems to have come to its senses.

You know, something what Apple did was actually important and inspiring to some. Let me present a little of Pascal code: http://www.computerhistory.org/highlights/macpaint/

I am one of the biggest dmr and ken fans in the world.

dmr and ken are definitely the pioneers, they're like elvis and jerry lee lewis.

sj is bob dylan (inspirational)

larry page and sergey brin are milli vannili (one hit wonder copy cats)

and bill g is linkin park (he just plain sucks)

horrible analogy and horrible fanboism

Great ideas in great work, great people never die.

They were both the Ada Lovelace of their fields.

But Dennis didn't wear black turtlenecks everyday so obviously he's less important.

</sarcasm>

Both Jobs and Ritchie were important men. I don't know what you think you are going to accomplish here. Your posts are about neither of them, they are all about you.

I'm merely citing the fluff that has occupied Hacker News recently such as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3100278.

What sane, non-obsessed person gives a flying fuck what uniform someone wore and why they wore it?

Merging of tech, fashion / hiring the "best" for design, etc.

Branching out from engineering vs design (where so many say "I'm a coder, not a designer" and, making the point, that sometimes, you should invest (even by hiring), into "design."

I dunno, seems relevant to building applications for layman.

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