Everyone fawned when Steve Jobs passed.
They were -- and are -- fools.
Steve Jobs? Oh sure, he "gave you what you wanted." But he did it, and turned Apple into a household name with massive profits, by exploiting child and near-slave labor to the point that their contract factories in China have had to put nets up so you can't commit suicide by jumping off the buildings!
This is something we should applaud?
Well the fanboi's sure did last week.
Today? Where are the real accolades?
We're getting reports today that Dennis Ritchie, the man who created the C programming language and spearheaded the development of Unix, has died at the age of 70. The sad news was first reported by Rob Pike, a Google engineer and former colleague of Ritchie's, who confirmed via Google+ that the computer scientist passed away over the weekend, after a long battle with an unspecified illness.
Dennis was an actual visionary who created something real. He's the reason you have a iFeminineProduct. He's the reason Tickerforum, The Market Ticker and virtually every web site on the planet exists.
Dennis was the father of the "C" Language and one of the prime developers (the other two of note being Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson) of the Unix operating system,without which none of these things you claim to be so enamored with - including Apple's products - would be with us today.
Dennis didn't work for a business that employs slave labor and exploits kids in third-world ****holes cranking out plastic crap they then sell at 70% operating margins by creating a "buzz" that is 180 degrees out of phase with the reality of their wage and environmental arbitrage. He instead worked for an organization that was dedicated to and practiced basic research - Bell Labs.
"C" is an elegant language that has the power of assembler with both the readability and usability of a high-level language. That power means it can be abused and often is, and that in turn has led to the rise of "highly structured" languages such as "C++" and similar (note the root of C++, however), albeit at what I would argue is the cost of significant bloat.
The elegance of "C" cannot be overstated; the entire Unix operating system is written in "C", making it an operating system and development environment that is self-referential - that is, it can and does compile itself!
I have personally written literal millions of lines of "C" code in my professional life, both for myself and others. As just one example the software this blog and Tickerforum runs on, akcs-www, is written entirely in the "C" programming language.
Dennis was a man who I never had the pleasure of meeting personally, but I along with millions of others have used the fruits of his labors for decades -- literal decades. The mark he left on the computing industry and the importance of his contribution to same is without parallel; literally everything we currently enjoy about The Web and all the companies surrounding it, past and present including my former MCSNet, would not have come into existence without what he, along with a handful of others, developed.
This is a man who truly deserves accolades and remembrances. He was not a marketer nor did he create a "consumer powerhouse" built upon arbitraging labor across international boundaries. Instead he labored in the furtherance of what made America great: He actually invented something that has gone on to be the enabling technology behind literally every bit of the so-called "Internet revolution."
That's what America used to be all about. It isn't any more, but it once was. The electric light, the telephone, the transistor (incidentally also developed at Bell Labs) and more all were ultimate products of this sort of research.
Instead of celebrating the life of men like Dennis who truly made a difference, we now laud those who manage to arbitrage someone else's misery into billions of dollars of personal profit. There is nothing special about the latter; throughout history many men and women have found a way to get rich through various forms of arbitrage, but in essentially all cases someone else -- and often lots of "someone else's" -- lose at least as much as they gain.
Dennis, and those like him, are a different matter. Oh sure, some like Edison had commercial desires behind their work, but there's nothing wrong with that standing alone. But there's a huge difference between marketing coupled with arbitrage and invention.
One is the act of exploitation, the other the act of creation. They could not be more different in character or lasting impact on society as a whole. Dennis, unlike Jobs, is an example of the latter and it is entirely fair to make the claim that without his contribution you wouldn't be reading this column, ordering from Amazon or, for that matter, using your favorite iFeminineProduct.
May Dennis, an actual inventor and prime demonstration of both human innovation and progress, unlike so many others that our society place on a pedestal and fawn over like some latter-day Jesus, rest in peace.
