Dennis Ritchie Day | Hacker News Reader

Dennis Ritchie Day

radar.oreilly.com

111 pointsrnicholson6 comments

I agree with this sentiment (and that Jobs would have left much less of a dent were it not for Ritchie), but I can't help but think we've got this whole thing backwards. We should celebrate people such as Jobs, Ritchie and Uncle John in their life while /they/ could enjoy it, and not wait until they're gone. (So really, every day should have been Dennis Ritchie day, and John McCarthy day, and et cetera.)

But if there's a Dennis Ritchie day, or a John McCarthy day, I'll certainly take time to celebrate the life of a real hacker. They will be missed.

Almost every day is Dennis Ritchie day for me, because almost every day I get to read and write C. Yes even in 2011. I look forward to hacker news being filled with C stories on the 30th.

Excellent initiative. John McCarthy deserves his own day, as well. And if we are allowed to go back in time, we ought to dedicate a day to the early founding fathers of computing, such as Alan Turing.

Turing gets an awful lot of credit for being a founding father of computing and the majority of it is undoubtedly deserved, but the man whom is consistently overlooked and really is one of the founders of modern computing is a man called Tommy Flowers. He really did design and build the world's first electronic programmable computer; Colossus I. Sadly, he gets very little recognition here in the UK and practically none from the computing profession.

I think world is really unfair - Dennis Ritchie & John McCarthy got little acknowledgement even though they built the core technology (Programming Constructs, LISP, C, Unix, AI and GC etc) which is foundation for the current {new} technology.

> I couldn't help be struck by Rob Pike's comments on the death of Dennis Ritchie a few weeks after Steve Jobs

Wow, O'Reilly's sense of time is way off. Ritchie's death was announced one week after Jobs.

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