Dennis Ritchie passes away at 70 (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Dennis Ritchie passes away at 70 (2011)

techcrunch.com

Assuming the point is that we focus too much on big personality rather than actual contribution, this is something that bugs me and I think about often. Ken Thompson is still around. So is Bjarne Stroustrup. Linus Torvalds is still heading the linux project. We need to celebrate these people. There are a ton of them and even as an enthusiast, I don't know who they all are and I'm ashamed. Most regular people haven't even heard these names and probably don't care to. Hell Stallman probably deserves a nobel prize for GNU.

Every industry has those people, though. With seven billion people in the world, there are going to be a lot of incredibly amazing people that we will never hear of, just because the bandwidth it would take to even hear their names (much less really understand their contributions) is just far too great.

Even though there are millions of outstanding contributors to our societies and technologies whose names I will never know, I am grateful for them.

This would have been much more poignant had:

1) This been posted on October 12th

2) We were still discussing the anniversary of Jobs' death on that date.

As it is right now, of course people are discussing the death of Jobs and not Ritchie because people don't usually talk about the 358th day since someone's death.

I think the submitter is making the point that we seem to have forgotten about Ritchie but have managed to remember the one-year anniversary of Steve Jobs's death.

That's fine, but I don't recall seeing any of the recent Jobs anniversary posts worded in the present tense. The title is just confusing. I was well aware of it at the time, but I had to think for a second because something in my brain was telling me that someone else had died, since Ritchie had passed away a year ago. I feared for Ken Thompson for a moment there.

[Edit: the date was not in the title originally as it is now.]

I think people occasionally submit present-tense articles for past events to try to make some very specific kind of point, sort of like a "have you forgotten?".

It's a bit bewildering and I'm not totally sure I understand the point.

The one that comes to mind recently was a 6 September 2012 submission with headline "Swedish rape warrant for Wikileaks' Assange cancelled" linking to the article http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11049316 from 2010.

It's lazy and passive-aggressive, the implication being, "figure out why this is relevant."

Someone made this comment on Techcrunch and it sums up the impact of Ritchie's work:

Without Ritchie, we would not have iOS for the iPhones, the Mac operating system and no basis for Java within the Android phones. No basis for Python and Ruby since they are written in C. Linux stood on the shoulders of Unix, just as Steve Jobs/Apple stood on the shoulder of many giants and this man was one of those giants. We lost a great tech leader. His impact was huge!, as billions of dollars was made releasing products that benefit from his work but he wasn't a billionaire, but impact is more than money.

Just in case you're confused, this article was published on October 13, 2011.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

  free(DennisRitchie); /* If ptr is a null pointer, no action occurs. */

In 2011.

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