Dear Sabuj,
Your opening remark made me worried that the facetious "what has he
done since?" might be taken seriously ... . That was not what was intended!
A variant of the joke was about a similar committee in charge of evaluating
God's performance, and coming up with "Sure, he created the Universe, but
what has he done since?". I was certainly not implying that Dennis Ritchie
had slept on his laurels after the two pieces of work Miguel mentioned - I
was only trying to share some light humour about the often over-competitive
and pettily critical system under which we all have to live and operate.
With best wishes,
Gerard.
--
On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 09:36:21AM -0500, Sabuj Pattanayek wrote:
> The silence on this list was deafening.
>
> > group is saying: "OK, so he discovered fire and invented the wheel - but
> > what has he done since?".
>
> 1983 Turing Award
> 1990 IEEE Hamming medal
> 1999 National Medal of Technology
> 2011 Japan Prize for Information and Communications (while he was
> still alive I think)
>
> Even if he hadn't done anything technologically innovative that was
> made public since C and UNIX, his C book (which was the first
> programming book I read in it's entirety) and the foundations of his
> OS have helped countless millions of people. I find it sad that in
> many undergrad computer science curricula, C is no longer being
> taught. If you want to understand how software works under the hood
> you either learn assembly or C.
