Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On
wired.com
wired.com
[1] https://plus.google.com/101960720994009339267/posts/33mmANQZ...
I guess it's too bad that I won't see what other slightly-rounded, double-priced white objects he would have produced.
How can you even compare that to developing the C language?
Once I land I'll use the same "status-symbol widget" to check my email and respond to any particularly urgent requests; I'll use the same device to call my wife and tell her I'm on the ground safely. Might even take a picture to send to her if I feel like it.
Then I'll get in my rental car, where I'll use my "status-symbol widget" to help me get to my ultimate destination, a hotel room I booked using the same device that's going to help me get there.
Once there, I'll fire up the device to find someplace good to eat.
It's always very sad when a human being dies. But excuse me if I don't worship the corporate hero who produced the object you use to do things which aren't necessary using non-unique technology.
I'll grant that one thing Steve Jobs did develop was the brand strategy that makes you rabid when someone challenges your decision of buying small electronic devices you don't need at a significant markup, because it's become a part of your personal identity.
On the contrary, Dennis Ritchie and other great tech people talked to our minds, for example, to give us a philosophy of how to create small programs to combine in a Lego fashion to create bigger ones (Unix philosophy), or to better program the machine underneath with a versatile language such as C. They are far more profound.
Second sad fact is that Steve Jobs gave minimal back to open source community (for example, BSD..), and defended a world where the company milks the users to the full limit.
Don't forget one of the worst forms of iPollution: "Sent from my iFoo". Why should people reading your messages care?
I think that sums up the difference between Jobs and Ritchie quite nicely. I'm not celebrating or mourning either of their deaths, but I recognize that Ritchie's contributions to our industry affect what I do on a daily basis from the OS level up. Jobs' contributions? Not so much.
Yes, but Jobs work affect non-geek's life in the same way. Not everybody is a programmer. Sure C was the a big milestone but you cannot say that I iPhone didn't revolutionize the smart phone market and put it into those people's hands who would never have bought such a thing otherwise.
I think those that complain about 'status symbol widgets' while complaining of persecution by Apple loyalists should consider that just taking a diametric stance doesn't make you any more objective.
He made it accessible and usable for non-geeks.
It is interesting with some geeks and HCI-design: It is not that they consciously don't like or value good HCI - it is more like it is invisible for them. They don't realize that it even exists! So they think Apple products becomes successful because they are white and have rounded corners (something that should surely be easy for the competition to copy), and they think the users love their products only because of the brand (which is really a circular argument, for how did Apple end up with a brand that people love?)
I appreciate the insight to Ritchie's immortal legacy. But basing legacies on such logic quickly deteriorates into gibberish.
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).
I guess I can see that, but to me it's not surprising; people die all the time, and attention to their death is mostly, I'd say, driven by how famous among the general public they were previously, which tends to favor politicians, athletes, popular musicians, businessmen, etc. The only thing that even makes it particularly noticeable here is the juxtaposition, since they were both in tech and died within a short distance. If it were Dennis Ritchie versus a big pop star, nobody would bother to raise an eyebrow at how much more front-page coverage the pop star got.
As far as important people whose deaths went largely unheralded, the death of Norman Borlaug a couple of years ago is another great example.
I wouldn't bet on that
Artists always get more press than the guy who does the amazing engineering or science. It is the way of the world. Certain exceptions exists, where the engineer / scientist has a unique look or style (e.g. Einstein). The public consciousness loves the archetype.
Ritchie was a great man, but if the article needs to degenerate Steve Jobs to prove it, then it is poorly written and tarnishes both their memories. Both learned their lessons well from the generations before them and used the tools of others to create great and amazing things.
[downvotes? really? how about you be the type of person to tell me what's untrue here?]
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.
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.
(that is, incidentally, my favorite photo ever)
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, ...
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.
Regarding the imprint: No user will see an imprint of C in his iPhone, and the applications could be written in Pascal to the same iPhone APIs.
(not to dimish Ritchie work which I really like)
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.
Isn't Windows still in C/C++ ? Not to mention Office, Windows Phone, XBox....
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.