At Linux World Atlanta 1999 there was a booth that had snap bracelets. I was looking at them in frustration and stated "I think you need a PhD to figure this out". The guy standing next to me responded "I have a PhD" and stormed off. The guy working the booth then enthusiastically proclaimed "Do you know who that was? That guy is a Demigod, that was Dennis Ritchie".

Dredged up an old login to comment - this "submit to the library" process was still ongoing when I got my PhD in Chemistry in the early 80's. I assume things got easier once the processes were fully digitized.

And I agree with the thought that implementation > theory. While I studied theory, my enjoyment is making things - tools for others to do or make things. The old hacker ethic.

Apparently, Ritchie wrote about himself

"""

I . . . received Bachelor’s and advanced degrees from Harvard University, where as an undergraduate I concentrated in Physics and as a graduate student in Applied Mathematics . . . The subject of my 1968 doctoral thesis was subrecursive hierarchies of functions. My undergraduate experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be a physicist, and that computers were quite neat. My graduate school experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be an expert in the theory of algorithms and also that I liked procedural languages better than functional ones.

"""

I just wonder what the functional programming language landscape was like in 1968.

You do not have to wonder, you can start here to read up on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)

Thought I read this before.

> Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on the blog of the Computer History Museum.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23582070