There's that line from Newton about standing on the shoulders of giants. We're all standing on Dennis' shoulders. _{(Brian Kernighan)}

Background

In 2020, Nerdearla hosted an event with talks and interviews, inviting lot of important people. One of those was a talk by Brian Kernighan and then a Q&A with Kernighan and Jon Maddog Hall.

The talk was "virtual" (due to COVID-19), and people could ask questions which were voted and the most voted questions were asked to Brian and Jon. You can watch the whole video in the Youtube video "Unix: History and Memoir" uploaded by Nerdearla, or jump to the Q&A which starts at minute 50:30.

I participated in that Q&A asking them to tell us a story about Dennis Ritchie, and my question was the most voted (yay!).

The memorable stories about Dennis Ritchie, by Brian Kernighan and Jon Maddog Hall

Here is my question, and the answer from Brian and Jon (a transcription from the video, not literal transcription but close enought):

Could you tell us a memorable story about Dennis Ritchie?

Answer by Brian Kernighan: One memorable story about Dennis, and it speaks to his basic generosity as a person: Bill Plauger and I were writing a book that was called Software Tools. In that we were trying to create programs that were written in Ratfor (a dialect of FORTRAN that sort of looks like C)

We wanted to include illustrations of tools that programmers might find useful, one of those would be a macro processor. This is something we don't use a lot now, but think of something that would be rather like the C pre-processor, but a little more general purpose and a little more systematic, not tight to C so much. So I wrote a terrible macro processor, because I wasn't a very good programmer, I don't think I really understood what I was doing. And what I produced was so terrible that could not possibly have worked in the book.

So, I explained this problem to Dennis one day and said I have this macro processor, it's terrible, I don't know what to do. And he went away and came back at probably within a day, and he gave me a macro processor. It's the M4 macro processor, which is still alive today, still used. He wrote it in C, obviously, and so I've got to translate it into Ratfor. But he did all the work, and he never wanted any credit for it in any way or whatsoever.

So there we have Dennis, a person of incredible talent, ability to write useful code, very very short order, really good code. And giving it away without the slightest interest in getting any kind of credit for it. So there you have a memorable story, at least to me, of a really memorable person.

Answer by Jon Maddog Hall: I have a similar story, it was a UNIX _{(US TICS conference? not sure what he said)} conference, we had a reception downstairs and there was lots of lots of people standing around, talking to each other and stuff.

And I looked over, and there was Dennis Ritchie standing by himself with a glass of white wine in his hand, and nobody was talking to him. And I recognized this syndrome where people are so in awe of somebody like Dennis Ritchie that they don't want to go up to talk to him, and that's terrible. And probably you _(Brian) have experienced the same thing. But Dennis was just the most open and frankly and nice person I've ever met.