This is why when Steve Jobs died in 2011 another far more important figure died... Dennis Ritchie. The man who made the C programming language and Unix, without which nothing Apple produced would be possible.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 35 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Not to downplay dmr's importance here because he quite literally is the father of modern computing, but without him we'd just have something else and perhaps it would've been a bit later. A different systems programming language and a different operating system everything else is modeled after. High-level programming languages weren't a new concept when he wrote C. Before B they already had Fortran. Funny to call any of those High-level in 2026, but that's the whole importance of C, isn't it? It made writing complex systems easy compared to assembly languages or even fortran.

I'm not gonna bother doing a writeup about Jobs, we all here know he made precisely Jack shit.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 hour ago

I’m not gonna bother doing a writeup about Jobs, we all here know he made precisely Jack shit.

Money, and enemies who couldn't actually do anything.

[–] username123@sh.itjust.works 6 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Not necessarily against what you said, but I realized you can kinda say that about anything, with some abstraction. There’s always smart people (thankfully), and they’ll often arrive at the same solutions. Roll over, Gauss.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 0 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Well I think it's different for scientific discoveries where something is either found or not. Software and other products... There are niche things that may never exist without the author, and there are generic things that would be created in one form or another anyway. Once programming languages were a thing, general purpose high level languages were bound to happen IMO and there are infinite possible languages.

[–] username123@sh.itjust.works 1 points 12 hours ago

Sure, but what I’m saying is that at a high level of abstraction scientific discoveries are similarly inevitable as well. I don’t think niche creations are a major difference since as you yourself stated “without him we'd just have something else and perhaps it would've been a bit later.”. The majority build on previous findings, often many scientists are working towards the same goals, and truth is truth, whether it be found through physical experimentation or fleshing out applied logic.

[–] The_Decryptor@aussie.zone 8 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Apple used Pascal up until the System 7 era anyway, C was just one of many choices of the time.

If we didn't have C, we'd probably have eliminated things like buffer overflows and out of bounds memory accesses decades ago.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 5 points 18 hours ago

Oh wow I didn't realize Pascal was even older than C, thought it showed up in like mid-70s or early 80s. To be fair I've ever only interacted with Delphi, not OG Pascal.

While I don't necessarily like C, I am happy for C-style syntax over Pascal-style, which I've also worked with. Give me braces over begin and end any day of the week.

[–] Ricaz@lemmy.world 1 points 16 hours ago

Yeah, Apple would just steal literally every single idea and piece of software from someone else