[sid0]

let's not compare both.

Ah yes, the cognitive dissonance of an Apple fanboy developer who knows that C is far more important than anything SJ ever did yet can't reconcile that with their belief that SJ was god.

Shame on Hacker News's audience that the front page isn't filled up with Dennis stories right now.

[davidmathers]

Shame on Hacker News's audience that the front page isn't filled up with Dennis stories right now.

Right now 14 of the top 15 stories are about Dennis Ritchie.

[sid0]

Yeah, that wasn't true when I made that comment earlier. I'm happy that the community seems to have come to its senses.

[BasDirks]

Your comment reeks of fanboyism much more. Don't litter the frontpage posts on our heroes with bitter comments please.

[chugger]

I love dmr. nobody's questioning dmr's contributions to computer science and technology. I love them both.

[sid0]

Don't litter the frontpage posts on our heroes

Speak for yourself. Steve Jobs was not my hero. I respected him but did not like him one bit.

[BasDirks]

Our heroes = Your hero (Richie) + my heroes (Richie, Steven)

[chuinard]

I usually spell a hero's name right.

[BasDirks]

grats

[InclinedPlane]

There's no shame, there just aren't the same type of stories about Dennis. Ritchie was a hacker, he created amazing things that were ahead of their time which have enabled a great many developers to build amazing things (including essentially the entirety of the infrastructure of the internet and the web). But so much of Ritchie's work was enabling and mentoring rather than directing and guiding (which was more Jobs' MO). How many tens of thousands of developers were enabled to do amazing things by Unix or C? How many developers had moments of inspiration and enlightenment as reading through K&R enabled them to achieve a higher level of sophistication in their programming skills? But how many of those examples make for good storytelling?

[sid0]

I meant "stories" in the journalistic sense.

[rimantas]

You know, something what Apple did was actually important and inspiring to some. Let me present a little of Pascal code: http://www.computerhistory.org/highlights/macpaint/

[biot]

  > C is far more important than anything SJ ever did

That's like saying the paintbrush is far more important than the paintings of Michelangelo or da Vinci.

[guard-of-terra]

We don't have one historical person who invented the paintbrush. It's prehistoric probably. But we do have Ritchie.

And yes, ge gots to be far more important because he's first in the food chain. He invented the paintbrush and went on inventing the art itself.

[grammaton]

No, it's like saying the invention of the paintbrush is more important - and frankly, it is.

[skeptical]

A paintbrush is indeed far more important than the painting of Michel Angelo or da Vinci from an historical point of view.

On top of that, there are thousands of programming language today, many relying deeply on concepts and paradigms that are much younger than C itself, but C remains one of the most used languages. Not only C is very much used, it's still the only option in many cases and it is by far, the language that is most used to implement other languages, or at least to bootstrap them.

Considering the age of the paintbrush comparing to, say, spray ink, your analogy is in fact, not only valid, but a very good one.

[dbbo]

No, it isn't. Da Vinci used a paintbrush to paint. Steve Jobs did not use C to program, because he never wrote any code or even designed anything according to at least one verifiable source[1].

It's more like saying the paintbrush is more important than anything some really successful art dealer ever did.

http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/steve-jobs-never-had-... (the book mentioned in the blog post, not the post itself)

[chugger]

I am one of the biggest dmr and ken fans in the world.

dmr and ken are definitely the pioneers, they're like elvis and jerry lee lewis.

sj is bob dylan (inspirational)

larry page and sergey brin are milli vannili (one hit wonder copy cats)

and bill g is linkin park (he just plain sucks)

[Androsynth]

horrible analogy and horrible fanboism