Dennis Richie is a personal hero of mine and i go out of my way to buy a cake every September 9th to celebrate his contributions to the world. It's a real shame his passing was overshadowed at the time.
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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Overshadowed? What was it overshadowed by?
Steve Jobs died one week earlier.
Who?
Some business guy, who stole ideas, apparently.
“Great artists steal” — Steve Jobs ( or Faulkner, or Picasso, or Stravinsky )
Sorry, unrelated, but my Lemmy client says that you have “-1” downvotes and 49 upvotes. How is that even possible? It should only be a positive integer. On the web client, it shows nothing for downvotes, but says 48 upvotes instead of 49…
Steve Jobs' death
It's so sad Steve Jobs died of ligma
What's Steve?
Steve deez nuts
Got me confused on which goat have such interesting name, turn out it's GOAT not goat.
Lol
🅱️rogramming language
I went looking for the implied 'A' language but couldn't find it. Did find this though:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages
Surprising how many single letter names there are.
B was based on BCPL, which I assume is where the name came from.
But the actual A language would be APL, which stands for A Programming Language. It's a few years older than B and was pretty popular, so it could've influenced the name.
A Programming Language
Gotta admire the wherewithal of continuing down the alphabet rather than just "Another Programming Language", through "Yet Another Programming Language" to "Dude, Where's My Programming Language".
That trend probably didn't exist at the time
It goes back further than you may think. YACC was written in "B" originally.
It is hard for me to believe APL was popular. I forgot that Microsoft claimed to be making it for Motorola and Intel.
Ada would be a good stand in for A based on the historical context of the name.
Should have gone for something like "Dennis Richie Advanced Computing University Lab Annex."
Parses weird, but look at that acronym.
Too bad about the typo on the sign...
AdvanceD.
Advance computing means it's computing performed ahead of time - if it means anything at all.
I'm assuming the speculative-execution bugs were their fault then
This is the future, instructions will be executed before they are run.
Actually that’s kind of like what CPUs do today with branching.
Where?
It would probably make more sense for "ADVANCE" to be "ADVANCED"
“ Denis Ritchie Advance ! “, just put an exclamation mark at the end of the first line. More of a declaration .
Programming Languages today: Rust, Go, Typescript
Programming Languages back then: C, B, C#, C++
LOL
C# is much more recent than C/BCPL etc. What's interesting, though, is how many of C these more modern languages are inspired by C. C is also very much still in use!
The name C++ is an inside joke as ++ is the C language increment operator, meant to imply that C++ is an improvement on C.
I have heard several times that the name C# was meant to look like the ++ had been added again to the name C++. The syntax of C# was chosen to be familiar to programmers that knew C++.
If we are saying old languages use letters for names and that newer ones use words, it is worth noting that C# was also heavily inspired by Java, which came first. Both Java and JavaScript are from 1995 ( iolder than C# ).
In the grand scheme, Go is not much newer than C#. Go is from 2009 and C# is from 2000. That might seem like a lot but Go was intended as an alternative to C which is from 1972.
C got its name as a progression over B, which started the whole single letter thing, but C syntax was chosen to look like ALGOL ( 1958 ). So we have to blame ALGOL for the look of C, C++, Java, C#, JavaScript, and even Rust.
Two of the oldest languages as FORTRAN and Lisp. Language names were often abbreviations ( such as FORmula TRANslation for FORTRAN ). Lisp was originally LISP ( list processing ) but the name Lisp, from 1960, fits right in with Go and Rust I would say.
The trend is certainly towards more whimsical names though. An early name for C was NB which stood for “New B”. If it were named like we do today, maybe it would have been called “Newbie” or some synonym of that. I kind of like Punk.
Ayo same here in an indian college
I recently read Kernighan's UNIX: A History and Memoir. It was pretty interesting. Also, Bell Labs still hosts a page with a lot of links/info for Richie at: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/
Which college bro?