感谢 Dennis Ritchie，没有他就没有这一切

今天早上，互联网上传来一则消息：丹尼斯·里奇去世了。

里奇博士并不像史蒂夫·乔布斯那样拥有主流的崇拜者，但他对我们生活的计算机世界的创造，甚至是美学，做出了更大的贡献。几乎不可能找到一款不直接归功于里奇的个人计算产品或范例。

20 世纪 70 年代，丹尼斯·里奇在贝尔实验室发明了 C 语言，并参与开发了 Unix 操作系统。在 C 和 Unix 出现之前，计算机世界是支离破碎的，这种局面令人难以想象——没有一种软件可以运行在各种计算机上。所有东西都是为特定平台定制的，每个平台对于诸如“一个字节有多大？”等基本概念都有截然不同的标准。

我们拥有的一切——互联网服务器、电话主干网、我用来输入此文的键盘中的微处理器——都源自里奇的工作。您正在 Drupal 支持的网站上阅读本文；Drupal 是用 PHP 编写的，而 PHP 又是用 C 编写的。（除非您使用打印机打印出该页面，而打印机的内部是用 C 语言编码的。）请看下表，其中列出了用于实现流行软件的编程语言。请注意 C 列的填充量有多大，旁边是 C++ 列，它是作为增强型 C 开发的。

为了避免他的遗产看起来枯燥无味、不为人知，我将完整引用丹尼斯·里奇 1994 年为《Unix 仇恨者手册》所写的“反序言”。里奇是对的。

From: [email protected] Date: Tue, 15 Mar 1994 00:38:07 EST Subject: anti-foreword To the contributers to this book:

I have succumbed to the temptation you offered in your preface: I do write you off as envious malcontents and romantic keepers of memo- ries. The systems you remember so fondly (TOPS-20, ITS, Multics, Lisp Machine, Cedar/Mesa, the Dorado) are not just out to pasture, they are fertilizing it from below.

Your judgments are not keen, they are intoxicated by metaphor. In the Preface you suffer first from heat, lice, and malnourishment, then become prisoners in a Gulag. In Chapter 1 you are in turn infected by a virus, racked by drug addiction, and addled by puffiness of the genome.

Yet your prison without coherent design continues to imprison you. How can this be, if it has no strong places? The rational prisoner exploits the weak places, creates order from chaos: instead, collec- tives like the FSF vindicate their jailers by building cells almost compatible with the existing ones, albeit with more features. The journalist with three undergraduate degrees from MIT, the researcher at Microsoft, and the senior scientist at Apple might volunteer a few words about the regulations of the prisons to which they have been transferred.

Your sense of the possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want something different, but can't seem to get people to use it; sometimes one wonders why you just don't shut up and tell people to buy a PC with Windows or a Mac. No Gulag or lice, just a future whose intellectual tone and interaction style is set by Sonic the Hedgehog. You claim to seek progress, but you succeed mainly in whining.

Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy.

Bon appetit!

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