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The passing of pioneers


By SD Times
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December 12, 2011 —  (Page 1 of 6)
Dennis Ritchie, programmer and co-creator of Unix
Dennis Ritchie

By Larry O’Brien
Dennis Ritchie preferred to be known by his username “dmr.” Three letters, lower-case. It speaks to the modesty of the man who was the primary designer of the C language, the “portable assembly language” that has dominated the practical world of programming for decades.

Put aside, for the moment, its influence on other languages: C itself remains one of the most in-demand programming languages four decades after its development. What other specific technologies, in our young and turbulent field, can claim similar longevity? The only obvious other candidate is Unix, on which dmr collaborated with its primary developer Ken Thompson.

Like John McCarthy's LISP, C is as near-perfect an embodiment of its concepts as software can be. LISP is a cool mirror of the theories of Alonzo Church; it brings to mind ivy-draped campuses and chalkboards and the limitless power of math. C's different, with its moving parts, complexity, and frustration-yielding-to-triumph; when you program in C, you can smell the circuit boards and hear the fans.

Nonetheless, it derives from Turing by way of von Neumann and needs apologize for nothing. If today's programmers don't concern themselves with whether a variable resides in a register or in the stack or on the heap, it's only because, at some level, someone else has addressed the issue, and they did so, almost certainly, using C or its offspring, C++.

Unix shows the same bold but precise intellect. In "Reflections on Software Research," the 1983 lecture he gave when he and Thompson were awarded the Turing Award, dmr said, "Unix is a simple, coherent system that pushes a few good ideas and models to the limit. It is this aspect of the system, above all, that endears it to its adherents."

Again, the self-effacing passive voice hides the sweeping triumph of envisioning and implementing an elegant solution to a gnarly pragmatic problem. The most important of those "few good ideas" was the idea of an operating system made of independent but interoperable building blocks. Another good idea was the widespread use of text as the medium of interchange and configuration, despite the obvious performance edge that could be gained by binary data formats. But the advantages of human readability have kept the Unix shell a touchstone of the developer's life for more than 40 years.

C and Unix are unabashed triumphs. For 40 years, they gave rise to programmers who could work at the low level that industry demands, but whose skills were not wholly wedded to hardware. As Moore's Law and manufacturing changes rewrote chip architecture again and again, developers could switch to them with relatively little pain. It wasn't that they made software portable; it was that they made us portable.

Not every programming career has depended on C, but mine and many others have.

Thank you, dmr.

Larry O'Brien is a technology consultant, analyst and writer. He also writes the Code Watch column for SD Times.


Related Search Term(s): Dennis Ritchie, Alan Haberman, Steve Jobs, Robert Morris, John McCarthy, Michael Hart

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Comments


12/20/2011 07:18:02 PM EST

Are you serious? John McCarthy coined the term "Artificial Intelligence" and was creator of the Lisp programming language - NONE OF WHICH IS MENTIONED in the McCarthy essay in the six-part salute to fallen pioneers. Written by Whitfield Diffie, listed as a co-inventor of public-key cryptography, the essay devolves into how Diffie 'discovered' public-key cryptography while house-sitting McCarthy's house while McCarthy was gone on sabbatical. Really?? That's the McCarthy legacy you want to list in this salute to the major figures who passed this year? The Wikipedia article on McCarthy properly covers his lifetime of achievements (and does not contain the string 'crypto'). The article on Diffie does not mention McCarthy. The article on public-key cryptography does not contain 'McCarthy' and seems to indicate some parts of the topic were independently invented simultaneously by others besides Diffie. John McCarthy is not around to stand up for his legacy, so I thought I would. Chuck Somerville Dayton Ohio Computing since 1975

United StatesChuck Somerville


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