Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

Re:Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation by IncRnd on Saturday June 20, 2020 @09:48AM (#23583921)

Ritchie: I liked procedural languages better than functional ones.

ChrisMarshallNY: I suspect that he understood functional languages quite well. He just didn't like them.

Your statement doesn't follow from Ritchie's words that you quoted. Preference of A over B does not have the logical consequence that B is disliked. It doesn't even imply that A is intensely liked.

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Re:Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation by ChrisMarshallNY on Saturday June 20, 2020 @01:54PM (#23585365)

Fair point.

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Re:Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation by IncRnd on Saturday June 20, 2020 @03:32PM (#23586405)

I've been researching your point since I read your comment, but I haven't been able to learn if he actually disliked functional languages.

Personally, I prefer Haskell or some functional Python at times, since that solves certain problems well. But, we have a lot more computing resources than existed in the past. I guess it could be possible that he enjoyed the functional paradigm, but pragmatically created a procedural language, given the hardware constraints.

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Re:Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation by ChrisMarshallNY on Saturday June 20, 2020 @06:58PM (#23588152)

I thought he was talking about Mathematics.

It's a functional language.

Always has been.

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Re:Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation by IncRnd on Saturday June 20, 2020 @10:14PM (#23589170)

From that standpoint, C is a functional language. Functions are first class citizens in C. I doubt that is what he was discussing.

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