{"id":803,"date":"2011-10-14T04:29:25","date_gmt":"2011-10-14T09:29:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=803"},"modified":"2017-01-12T11:35:32","modified_gmt":"2017-01-12T16:35:32","slug":"a-hackers-hacker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=803","title":{"rendered":"A hacker&#8217;s hacker"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Before someone else is &#8220;absolutely stunned&#8221; by my silence, let me hereby note with great sadness that Dennis Ritchie, principal designer of C, co-designer of Unix, Turing Award winner, and one of the world&#8217;s legendary computer scientists, has passed away at 70. \u00a0(See <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/10\/14\/technology\/dennis-ritchie-programming-trailblazer-dies-at-70.html?hp\">here<\/a> for the NYT obituary, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zdnet.co.uk\/news\/business-of-it\/2011\/10\/13\/dennis-ritchie-father-of-unix-and-c-dies-40094176\/\">here<\/a> for a more detailed ZDNet obituary, and <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.computationalcomplexity.org\/2011\/10\/dennis-ritchie-1941-2011.html\">here<\/a> for Lance Fortnow&#8217;s encomium.) \u00a0I didn&#8217;t know Ritchie, but my father did, as a science and technology writer in the 70s and 80s. \u00a0And I often saw Ritchie in the halls when I spent several summers working at Bell Labs in college. \u00a0Mostly, though, I know Ritchie through the beautiful language he created. \u00a0It&#8217;s a testament to C&#8217;s elegance and simplicity that I, though extremely far from a hacker, find it almost as easy to express my thoughts in C as I do in my mother tongue, MS-DOS QBASIC.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><strong>Update (Oct. 26):<\/strong><\/span> AI pioneer and LISP inventor John McCarthy has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/10\/26\/science\/26mccarthy.html\">passed away<\/a> as well. \u00a0It&#8217;s been a tough month for computing revolutionaries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Before someone else is &#8220;absolutely stunned&#8221; by my silence, let me hereby note with great sadness that Dennis Ritchie, principal designer of C, co-designer of Unix, Turing Award winner, and one of the world&#8217;s legendary computer scientists, has passed away at 70. \u00a0(See here for the NYT obituary, here for a more detailed ZDNet obituary, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=803"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":810,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803\/revisions\/810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}