Remembering Dennis Ritchie

I’ve been catching some flak from readers for having not written a column on the recent passing of Dennis Ritchie, father of the C programming language and co-author (with Ken Thompson) of UNIX. Ritchie also wrote with Brian Kernighan The C programming Language, which we all have on our bookshelves and some of us have even read. Ritchie was easily a greater contributor to computer science (as opposed to the computer business) than Steve Jobs, yet I wrote about Jobs’s passing and not Ritchie’s.  What’s with that?

The simple fact is that I didn’t know Dennis Ritchie. I did know Steve Jobs for 34 years and felt I could write about him.  When I wrote about […]

The second coming of Java

There’s a continuous revolution taking place in web development as platforms and tools evolved first to handle dynamic pages and now cloud services. But sometimes what goes around comes around so I’m predicting a resurgence of Java and Java-like languages as rotating storage goes into decline.  Here’s why.

In the beginning of the web we wrote web apps with Perl and C++ because that’s all we had.  This sucked.

C++ is awesome for anything requiring intense performance but because it operates at a comparatively low level (closer to the silicon) C++ is very hard for dopes like me to use. And in a way it’s an insult to the language, which gets bored waiting for databases and […]