Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

Mr. Dennis Ritchie, the Turing Award winner and the inventor of Unix and C, died of illness at his home in New Jersey, USA on October 8, 2011. It can be said that almost all online products are based on Mr. Dennis's achievements, and we stand on his shoulders. I would like to remember Mr. Ritchie with this article.

Mr. Dennis Ritchie, the father of the C language, died of illness at his home in New Jersey on October 8, 2011. This news has caused great repercussions among computer enthusiasts and researchers, but the descriptions of many eulogies and reminiscences are not accurate. Here, we take this article to review Mr. Ritchie's great contribution in his life, may the world remember it, and may you rest in peace.

Mr. Ritchie is known as the father of C, and he not only created C with Ken Thompson (Ken Thompson). He also developed the UNIX operating system, and many of the operating systems we use today are built on the UNIX kernel, including all the products of the Apple empire.

Recall that when Jobs died a week ago, there was a lot of praise and mourning on the Internet, and the global user worship brought about by the popularity of his products was unprecedented. In fact, Mr Ritchie deserves more of these accolades, or even more.

Rob, a colleague of Ritchie, who worked together at Bell Labs for 20 years, was the first to publish the news on Google+. Rob said:

When Jobs died, he enjoyed great remembrance. By contrast, Mr. Ritchie has made a greater contribution to the contemporary technological process, but it is unfair that the public does not even know who he is.

The Internet has become an indispensable part of contemporary life. However, without the C language and UNIX created by Ritchie, the network and any network products could not exist. For example, browsers are written in C and web servers are written in C. many people retort that they use JAVA or Clippers, but they are also derivatives of C. Including the web page architecture of Python and Ruby two programming languages, is also based on the C language. In addition, all network hardware products are written in C language, and UNIX is the basis on which the entire Internet runs. From this we can see that it is not too much for us to evaluate Mr. Ritchie's great achievements. Even Windows has been written in C, and Apple's operating systems on personal computers, iPad and iPhone are all based on UNIX.

Professor Martin of the Department of computer Science at MIT commented:

If Jobs is the king of visualization products, then Ritchie is the king of the invisible kingdom. Jobs' contribution was that he knew so much about users' needs and desires that he created technology that made contemporary people happy and miserable. However, it is Mr. Ritchie who provides the core components for these products, which people do not see, but use them every day. From B language to C language

In 1972, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson were operating the PDP- 11 Dijido computer

Ritchie's original intention in developing C was to need a better descriptive language when working with Ken Thompson on the UNIX system.

In the beginning, the UNIX kernel was written in assembly language. However, with the progress of development and the sharp increase in the amount of data, the demand for effective collation and flexible operation of the data arises at the historic moment. Around 1970, they tried to improve the Fortran language for data management and manipulation, but did not achieve the desired goal. Then a few years later, the two worked together to release the B language.

There are two rumors about the origin of the name of the B language. One is in memory of Ken's wife, Bonnie, while others say that B stands for BCPL, a computer language developed by Cambridge University in the mid-1960s. It doesn't matter whether the two statements are right or wrong, what matters is that the naming of the B language determines that the later improved version is named the C language.

B language is an interpretive language, that is to say, it plays an intermediate role in the operation of software and CPU. In contrast, C is a compiled language, which is compiled into a machine language before it is run and runs directly on CPU. Its running speed is not comparable to that of B language.

The earliest C language is not much different from the version framework we use today, but the function is much simpler. At that time, in order to meet the needs of developing a new UNIX kernel, it mainly provided data structures and variable types.

Ritchie once joked that C has the power and convenience of assembly language. This sentence means that the C language runs more closely to hardware systems. However, Ritchie's joke does not accurately locate the status of the C language, which provides a powerful data structure that runs through all high-level and low-level languages.

Rob explains the importance of data structures:

When you are writing a large program, you need to manage the relationships between the various components, including users, files, hard drives, program execution, and so on. In order to effectively control these parts, we first need to express the information and data used clearly and effectively, which is the data structure.

Just as the source code of UNIX is clear and smooth, it is easy to read. This is impossible without a good data structure as the basis. For example, when we need to classify and integrate a large amount of data, if we use the Fortran language, we will be at a loss.

Because of the effective and accurate definition of data structure in C language, it has strong portability. This feature makes the operating system written in C language can be used on different platforms, which is the main purpose of Ritchie's development of UNIX, and it is also the mainstream development method of the new operating system.

Apple, Microsoft, and others, all stand on Ritchie's shoulders.

Bill, chief scientist at Nvidia and a professor at Bell Laboratories at Stanford University, said:

The development of C language is an indelible great contribution in the history of science and technology, because this language grasps a crucial and appropriate intermediate point in computer science and technology. On the one hand, it has the ability to build high-level products. On the other hand, it can effectively control the underlying data. It is precisely because of this relevance and pivotal role that determines the mainstream way of computer programming guided by C language in the past three decades.

From Bell Labs to Microsoft, and to the well-known weapon, how did C language become the most powerful weapon in the revolution of science and technology to create the world?

The revolution began in 1973, when Ritchie published the first academic paper on the C language. Five years later, he and his colleague Brian Kenyhan wrote a landmark book, the C programming language (The C Programming Language). Kernihan later recalled that he went to great lengths to persuade Ricky to join the co-author camp, laughing that he almost "broke Ricky's arm."

Rob's admiration for Ricky comes from this book. At the time, he was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto. "it was the first time I read this book in my hospital bed, and I was immediately fascinated by its clear description and simple interpretation," he recalled. "the clear and accurate expression of this language and logic cannot be surpassed by any textbook or reference manual in the future. It is so classic that it even made me forget that I was sick at that time."

Through this book, many college students like Rob began to use the C language. Especially after Dambert Lab released the source code of UNIX, the trend of C language has been unstoppable. It can be said that the publication of UNIX source code not only promotes the development of computer language, but also determines that the open source plan in the future Internet era is the starting point. Ritchie was awarded the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Science and Technology in 1998.

According to Rob, Ritchie is a very low-key researcher. Unlike the individualism that Jobs sought to form a monopoly, Ritchie always hoped that his work would be used by more researchers and facilitate the future scientific research and technological progress of others.

Knihan commented: Newton said he was standing on the shoulders of giants, and now we are all standing on Ricky's shoulders.

This sentence should be the most powerful and pertinent evaluation of Mr. Dennis Ritchie's life.

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