Posted on 10/13/2011 9:00:58 PM PDT by budj
"Dennis Ritchie, an internationally renowned computer scientist who created the C programming language, has died at age 70. ..."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.cnet.com ...
emacs is built around LISP. It's only implemented (partially) in C.
That’s true, but C lets the errors of humans slide by silently.
Ada bitches up a storm.
Boeing did competing projects for the 777 FMS - one was in C++ and one was in Ada. After they saw the cost differential in delivering code that actually met the testing requirements, they shut down the C++ project, transferred everyone over to the Ada project and got on with it. “Using the right tool for the job” means using a tool that helps people find errors, not that helps people *hide* errors.
Wow, I'm going to have to spend some time and find the "Original" "Real Programmers" list... I especially liked the part about "fast motorcycles" (I had a Ducati 900SP until last year, when physical problems forced me to sell it), and it seems that the majority of my food comes from vending machines, even though I've been a network admin for the last 5 years.
Mark
Real Men don’t use those things.
Real Men can write machine code from their head and put it into the machine through the bat switches on the front panel of a PDP-11/20.
Been there, done that. Did it on HP-2100/S, HP-1000’s and microcomputers like the IMSAI too.
Since 1983, I’ve used some variant of Emacs for most of my editing. It is a huge productivity tool. Back in the days when I read all my email on a Sun, I used mh-e in Emacs for my mail, another window for my code, another window for the compilation error mode, another for the CVS child process, etc. Emacs provided an IDE before the term “IDE” was invented.
True dat.
Some folks should get over it, though. I was born before emacs. I sorta, from a distance, watched the lispers hacking it together.
It's all recursive again.
It's a wonder it doesn't go back in time.
I'd put obfuscated PERL against emacs source code any day of the week. ({If I can buff my parenthetical keys first}/
/johnny
Mark
Good for you. I use VI for most everything on text editiing, and some 8 bit twiddling.
And I've been this way for a long time.
I personally think Emacs is for persons weak in intellect and spirit.
VI builds character.
We've revived a religious war from the early '80s. Just right where it left off.
/johnny
Let down? LOL! Unix is everywhere! From the tiniest to the hugest. Both iOS and Android are Unix-based, as is the largest pool of computing resources in the world, the GOOG.
We lost two giants in a week. One early. And one really early.
/johnny
A wavey mirror for me... Last month, mom and brother-in-law.
I'm worn out with funerals.
And then, this month, around le lune chasseur.... we lose Jobs and Richie.
The last part of 2011 is starting to suck.
I say that from a personal level. I speak only for me and the local catz.
/johnny
Most of the people who used vi that came into cisco to work on IOS would switch. vi can’t keep up with the sheer amount of stuff a person needs to do in a system of that size (at the time I was hot and heavy into hacking IOS, it was 18 to 19 million LOC and growing rapidly). It would be funny to watch them flail around like someone drowning who is only able to dog-paddle. We’d take pity on them, take a week of our time and teach them how to use modern tools to deal with it.
I started using Emacs when I worked in a Lisp environment (NIL - “New Implementation of Lisp”, which was a precursor to Common Lisp). Using Emacs on a character display isn’t as slick as the Genera environment on a Symbolics lisp machine, but it gets you most of the way there. Genera... now that was a system way, way ahead of it’s time.
Who decides it's an error?
I'd rather have the freedom to accidentally type
rm -r /
Than be told that I wasn't allowed by the compiler or OS.
Because, someday, I may want to pull that trigger. And as a free entity, I'll insist on that.
/johnny
If you can't see it on one terminal screen, you've overcomplicated it.
BTW, how's that CISCO thing working out for you?
I marked CISCO/Linksys off my authorized vendors list back in June, when they busted (hard) the power draw specs on a switch.
Don't mess with a man with a power budget based on solar panels. He don't have anywhere to go.
/johnny
It’s everywhere *now*. Back then, the “Unix Mafia” was just starting their domination. And compared to other operating systems/environments on workstations (Lisp Machines, Symbolics, VAXstations running VMS), other computing environments like TOPS on DECsystem 20’s, Unix was this red-headed stepchild. It was cheap[er], but it was rough as a cob by comparison to the more polished systems. Unix back then was a great system.... for a programmer. You didn’t dare allow a mere user to run loose with a Unix system.
In Ye Olde Days, when a Unix system crashed, you mostly had to just sit there with your thumb up your butt, wondering what happened. On a mainframe or VAX/VMS system, the OS shipped with tools to help you debug the crash from the crash dump. Most VMS crashes I had to debug took me no more than about 30 minutes and I would know exactly what happened and why. My mainframe cohorts sometimes took longer to find their answers (especially when they were running VM/370), but only maybe an hour longer.
Unix systems? Heh. Oh, the fun we’d have. I think the worst Unix crashes I had to debug were on AT&T 3B2 systems. What a steaming pile those were... going from BSD 4.3 on a VAX back to SysVR2 with none of the BSD tools most of us took for granted was like going through heroin withdrawal. It was pretty plain to see that the future of Unix was not going to come “from the phone company.”
Your freedom as a programmer ends the moment public safety comes into play. Airbus is finding this out the hard way, and their errors are ones of design, not implementation.
In the future, I can see people who write software that has public safety issues will be licensed, just as PE’s are a requirement for CivE’s who design public works, or EE’s who design power generation and distribution systems.
Been retired from cisco since 2002. I hack on my own time and my own dime now, unless someone wants to cough up big fees to induce me to do software on a schedule again.
There are no bugs in C. There are poor programmers who use it incorrectly.
I have no doubt he contributed to Unix, that is documented.
But to say that he “invented” Unix is clearly wrong. A project that large would be impossible for one person to have accomplished. It would be like saying one man invented “Fat Man” or “Little Boy”.
Having the critical ideas, that is another thing.
OUTSTANDING!
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