I feel very uncomfortable with the constant comparison between Ritchie's death and Jobs' death. Even Rob Pike ended up doing this. [1] Why are we trying to create conflict and see injustice where there is none? The amount of media coverage a person gets has no correlation with his importance. Can we blame people for not knowing him? Don't give me the tired "everybody is using his software, so everybody should know about him" argument. It's so hypocritical. We use a lot of things whose inventors we don't know.
Despite the pissing wars, I don't think it's that anyone is looking to 'create conflict', since I'm betting most people who respected Ritchie also respected Jobs. Rather, I'm guessing it's that everyone who is making statements similar to Pike's sees a 'hardcore scientist guy' ignored next to a 'well-marketed guy', and they are very uncomfortable with that (despite the fact that both of them were more than the stereotypes I'm calling out here).
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).
sees a 'hardcore scientist guy' ignored next to a 'well-marketed guy', and they are very uncomfortable with that (despite the fact that both of them were more than the stereotypes I'm calling out here)
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.
If it makes anyone feel any better, I don't think Steve Jobs was all that interested in his personal celebrity. He was intensely private and only ever made public appearances to promote Apple and its products, and he only did that because he was the best at it. It's the rest of society that made him into a folk hero for what he did, and the fact is our society undervalues technical people like Dennis Ritchie.
As far as important people whose deaths went largely unheralded, the death of Norman Borlaug a couple of years ago is another great example.
> 'hardcore scientist guy' ignored next to a 'well-marketed guy'
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?]
Not to mention that Steve Jobs was so much younger than Ritchie. It's always sad when a great innovator dies but its doubly sad when he dies young. Steve's kids are much younger than Daniel's and are unfortunate to have lost their father at such a young age. Same goes for his wife.
My "status-symbol widget" is going to allow me to make a cross country flight tomorrow without carrying three sectional charts, a terminal area chart, and an airport/FBO directory. It will retain a GPS fix the entire flight, creating a moving map out of a VFR sectional chart and serving as an unofficial backup to the panel-mounted GPS.
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.
So you have phone GPS (like many phones) and you can read your email (like many phones) and you can make calls (like most phones) and you can use it to browse web pages. There have been small electronic devices doing combinations of these things for a long time, none of this is in any way exclusive or original to the iPhone. This all rests on decades of preceding technology not proprietary to Apple. Steve Jobs didn't make it new, he just made it white.
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.
"Steve Jobs didn't make it new, he just made it white."
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.
Are you honestly claiming that the person who spearheaded teams that created the Mac, NeXT, Mac OS X, the iPhone and the iPad had little effect on your computing experience? Forgive me if I don't believe you.
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.
>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.
Agree with piccadily, my main critic of Steve Jobs is that he is the inventor of the iFanboyism and misused the teenage envies to create status symbol gadgets which tech-wannabes use to show off here and there. They continuously ignored the deficiencies of what they held in their hands previous lack of true multitasking, a notification system which sucked, a walled garden which excluded threatening businesses, a simple button interface which didnt have widgets etc). However those iFanboys polluted all true tech discussions, by bringing such constructs to tech discussions like 'I love my ' , 'I browse the internet with my ...', 'Non-iphone users stink, or are poor etc', to further enlarge the status-widget.
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.
> However those iFanboys polluted all true tech discussions, by bringing such constructs to tech discussions like 'I love my ' , 'I browse the internet with my ...', 'Non-iphone users stink, or are poor etc', to further enlarge the status-widget.
Don't forget one of the worst forms of iPollution: "Sent from my iFoo". Why should people reading your messages care?
> Steve Jobs didn't make it new, he just made it white.
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?)
In retrospect general aviation's use of devices like the iPad should have seemed obvious. It's a demographic that likes and can usually afford technology. Anybody who flies a plane has the ability to use a binder in the cockpit, so there's no new clutter created. A perfect match.
You're right and I winced when the Jobs comparison was made early in the article. I'm not sure that making comparisons to Jobs isn't the right thing to do even if it wasn't done well here. Jobs and Richie are both heroes to computing culture but after Jobs death we're left feeling that Richie deserves similar praise in the popular press, but unable to easily explain to the public that Dennis impact on the world was on the same level as Jobs'. Wired is a popular magazine now and needs a way to communicate Richie's impact to it's readers, so they use Jobs as a comparison.
This. It's completely nonsensical to chastise the public for mourning someone disproportionately. Had Dennis passed a year from now, would this article have been written? This reasoning slips into the unproductive paradigms that elitists subscribe to to feel better about themselves. Are Ritchie's and Job's legacies inseparable? Yes. Does that mean their work is to be valued by precedence? No more than the likes of Tesla and Edison.
I appreciate the insight to Ritchie's immortal legacy. But basing legacies on such logic quickly deteriorates into gibberish.
True, plus both contributed to technology in their own ways and I highly doubt either man cared much about their popularity status. Why can't we just pay homage to their individuality?
I don't think this is the correct way to think of things. I think there are 2 different cultures that have contributed to the computing world today. The first is from academics and big company research. This is the legacy of IBM and AT&T Bell Labs - hackers wearing ties.
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.
I agree that there are two different cultures at work here. One, that of PARC and Bell Labs, was foundational. The other, of MS and Apple, are transformative.
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.
In a place like here (hacker news), the passing of Ritchie is obviously a very big deal. But I'm not surprised that my mom (for example) doesn't know who Ritchie was, regardless of how many devices and applications she uses written and designed in C. Hell, I'm not even sure every software dev out there knows the history of C, to be perfectly honest. But that doesn't take anything away from the amazing things Ritchie did for technology and mankind.
If you take an iPhone, it has so many thing invented by people, this article does not make any sense to me.
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, ...
Sure. But if you try to find commonalities amongst all those sub-components and dependencies you find that a great many of them carry back to dmr. Whereas the only comparable commonalities for things such as plastics and whatnot would tend to be scientists working hundreds of years ago.
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.
I'm sure, if C was not dominant, the iPhone could have been written say in Pascal. There is nothing specific in C that makes it a requirement for the iPhone. The same goes for operating systems.
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.
I found the article to be quite informative and, why not, just. Readers that are not acquainted with hacker culture will be able to know who Dennis Ritchie was and comprehend his importance after reading it.
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.
for a piece intended for a general audience I think the author did rather well, I can imagine a nontechnical person appreciating the world in a broader way having read it.
Early Apple computers used BASIC and assembly, Apple Lisa and early Apple Macintosh were Pascal oriented... Steve Jobs did just fine without C and Unix. It's true that there's Unix in OS X and iOS, but there there's Linux which powers Google and most of the datacenters today, it's in Android and almost any gadget you look at... and the article authors don't mention it because then it wouldn't be in any way anything specific to Steve Jobs...
Comments like this one show that Apple fanboyism knows no bounds.
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.
Just as I've already said (do read!) the original article makes the connection between Jobs and dmr much bigger than it should be and ignores a lot of technology which also uses dmr work. Why is fanboyism claiming 1) Jobs first big influences on technology were dmr free (Pascal in Lisa and Macintosh) and 2) authors didn't mention a lot of technology that directly uses things like C and Unix that dmr coauthored.
[1] https://plus.google.com/101960720994009339267/posts/33mmANQZ...