Farewell Dennis Ritchie

int main( int argc, char **argv )
{
printf( "Goodbye, world. :(\n" );
}



L'eulogie par Bjarne Stroustrup:

"
Before C, there was far more hardware diversity than we see in the
industry today. Computers proudly sported not just deliciously
different and offbeat instruction sets, but varied wildly in almost
everything, right down to even things as fundamental as character bit
widths (8 bits per byte doesn’t suit you? how about 9? or 7? or how
about sometimes 6 and sometimes 12?) and memory addressing (don’t like
16-bit pointers? how about 18-bit pointers, and oh by the way those
aren’t pointers to bytes, they’re pointers to words?).

There was no such thing as a general-purpose program that was both
portable across a variety of hardware and also efficient enough to
compete with custom code written for just that hardware. Fortran did
okay for array-oriented number-crunching code, but nobody could do it
for general-purpose code such as what you’d use to build just about
anything down to, oh, say, an operating system.

So this young upstart whippersnapper comes along and decides to try to
specify a language that will let people write programs that are: (a)
high-level, with structures and functions; (b) portable to just about
any kind of hardware; and (c) efficient on that hardware so that
they’re competitive with handcrafted nonportable custom assembler code
on that hardware. A high-level, portable, efficient systems
programming language.

How silly. Everyone knew it couldn’t be done.

C is a poster child for why it’s essential to keep those people who
know a thing can’t be done from bothering the people who are doing it.
(And keep them out of the way while the same inventors, being anything
but lazy and always in search of new problems to conquer, go on to use
the world’s first portable and efficient programming language to build
the world’s first portable operating system, not knowing that was
impossible too.)

Thanks, Dennis.
"

https://plus.google.com/u/0/101960720994009339267/posts/33mmANQZDtY

The UNIX Time-Sharing System
http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/vol57-1978/articles/bstj57-6-1905.pdf

UNIX Time-Sharing System: A Retrospective
http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/vol57-1978/articles/bstj57-6-1947.pdf

UNIX Time-Sharing System: The C Programming Language
http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/vol57-1978/articles/bstj57-6-1991.pdf

http://geektionnerd.net/un-genie-est-mort/