Gaponenko D.S., Kostiv V.K.

Oles Honchar Dnipropetrovsk National University, Ukraine

THE MOST OUTSTANDING PERSON OF OUR DECADE

In today’s fast-moving world when someone asks a teenager who is the most outstanding person of our decade, he prefers to answer that this person is definitely Steve Jobs. I did it as well. But then I spotted on the article which totally changed my mind and persuaded me that there was a person who deserved not less honor, I’d better claim, who deserved even more rights to having more toffees than Steve Jobs did.

Firstly I’d like to tell you some brief facts about Steve Job’s contribution into the world of IT. His friend Stephen Wozniak and him managed to run their own business when they both understood that computers would appeal to a broad audience. They had scarcely formed APPLE Inc., when it was met with an immediate success. But what was before such success? His first-engineered computers didn’t provoke interest of the customers. So that Mr. Jobs contributed his money in buying Pixar Animation Studio. It was there, where the world got to know what the full-length film is. “The Toy Story” was completely computer-animated and it was something to shout about! Approximately in 1996 he quickly created an award-winning advertising campaign that urged customers to “think different” and buy Macintoshes! It was an instant success due to which Steve Jobs transformed himself from being a creative motto-composer to a master of a high-technology marketer! But, unfortunately, last year he died because of cancer. This news spread all over the world much faster than cancer did in his body! But no one knows that there should be a place in our hearts for one more human-being. They both died practically in one day, but we all have forgotten to mention his name…

I’m speaking about Dennis Ritchie, who was best known as the creator of the C programming language, a key developer of the Unix operating system, and co-author of The C Programming Language, and was the 'R' in K&R (a common reference to the book's authors Kernighan and Ritchie). Ritchie worked together with Ken Thompson, the scientist credited with writing the original Unix; one of Ritchie's most important contributions to Unix was its porting to different machines and platforms. The C language is widely used today in application, operating system, and embedded system development, and its influence is seen in most modern programming languages.

C is often used for "system programming", including implementing operating systems and embedded system applications, due to a combination of desirable characteristics such as code portability and efficiency, ability to access specific hardware addresses, ability to pun types to match externally imposed data access requirements, and low run-time demand on system resources. C can also be used for website programming using CGI as a "gateway" for information between the Web application, the server, and the browser. Some reasons for choosing C over interpreted languages are its speed, stability, and near-universal availability.

One consequence of C's wide availability and efficiency is that compilers, libraries, and interpreters of other programming languages are often implemented in C. The primary implementations of Python (CPython), Perl 5, and PHP are all written in C. Due to its thin layer of abstraction and low overhead, C allows efficient implementations of algorithms and data structures, which is useful for programs that perform a lot of computations. For example, the GNU Multi-Precision Library, the GNU Scientific Library, Mathematic and MATLAB are completely or partially written in C.C is sometimes used as an intermediate language by implementations of other languages. This approach may be used for portability or convenience; by using C as an intermediate language, it is not necessary to develop machine-specific code generators. Some languages and compilers which have used C this way are BitC, C++, COBOL, Eiffel, Gambit, GHC, Modula-3, Squeak, and Vala. However, C was designed as a programming language, not as a compiler target language, and is thus less than ideal for use as an intermediate language. This has led to development of C-based intermediate languages such as C—.C has also been widely used to implement end-user applications, but much of that development has shifted to newer languages.

We would probably never have ISO C at all and MAC by the way, without the computer language which was created by Dennis Ritchie. I’m studying in IT faculty, that is why his very contribution plays a great role in my life. And I really am sure that Dennis Ritchie is worth being kept in the memories of us… They say: “The audience keeps silence, the heroes are being forgotten and the toffees can’t be noticed due to dust”. Probably for this reason the main purpose of my report is to bring back to life what Dennis Ritchie has done to all of us. I really want you not only listen to me, but also hear my key-message! Think different of the most outstanding people of today’s decade, explore the truth and be sure you are not mistaken!