This is so true tho

  • ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online
    0·
    23 hours ago

    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
      0·
      23 hours ago

      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.

      • username123@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        3 hours ago

        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·
          2 hours ago

          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.

      • The_Decryptor@aussie.zoneEnglish
        0·
        11 hours ago

        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
          0·
          8 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.

  • SapphironZA@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    24 hours ago

    They are real people

    XZ Utils (maintained single-handedly by Lasse Collin) is widely regarded as the most critical infrastructure library run by one person. Its near-catastrophic compromise in 2024 revealed how global digital security hinges on solo, thanklessly managed open-source projects. Other major examples include cURL (Daniel Stenberg) and SQLite (D. Richard Hipp)

  • Corbin@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    Discussed previously (here, there).

    I like to think of myself as the kind of person that, given enough time and documentation, can maintain anything; I think it’d still take three of me to do Ronald’s job. (Well, “job.” I think he technically works for Red Hat or something?)

  • SalamiDommie@lemmus.orgEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    The amount of businesses with things you just can’t touch for whatever reason is surprising.

    The reliance on something made that is barely understood by the entire company makes me think that society will drag on generations after any kind of societal collapse.

    • Lyrl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      0·
      8 hours ago

      Or more things will happen like the Bhopal disaster where a chemical plant, over a decade or so, laid off or failed to replace everyone who knew what their carefully designed multi-layered safety systems did. When those systems aged and needed maintenance, the remaining production people took them out one by one. Then 500,000 people were gassed with cyanide. 2,200 immediate deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

    • LePoisson@lemmy.world
      0·
      23 hours ago

      society will drag on generations after any kind of societal collapse.

      Reminds me of the Imperium in Warhammer 40k how a lot of the tech they use is barely understood or some of it is not understood at all. Like the adeptus mechanicus believe in the Omnissiah (me too) and a lot of what they do is purely ritualistic.

      But lots of those rituals are just stuff like turning something on in the right order. Or other mundane things that have become an arcane ritual after thousands of years that need doing for a thing to work right but nobody remembers why it needs to be done or how the thing works. Just that these are things you must do to please the machine spirits and make whatever random thing work right.

      Honestly there is enough complexity in enough tech nowadays that I’m sure almost all of us are doing something similar in many areas of our life. Like I would struggle to explain how the Internet works or even how my television actually creates an image on itself. Maybe a better example would be cars, a lot of people use them but don’t know anything about necessary maintenance or basic principles of how they work.

        • mcv@lemmy.zip
          0·
          7 hours ago

          Configure the right incantations and the machine god will serve your web pages, brother.

    • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@feddit.ukEnglish
      0·
      1 day ago

      Social collapse isn’t an exciting day in your life, it’s a broad trend historians will puzzle over centuries later. Look at the bronze age collapse for an example.