It’s another sad week. The computing world lost a great pioneer and a true visionary, the legendary one-and-only Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie. If all he did was only to invent C, we still owed him a lot. But he also cocreated Unix! Imagine if C and Unix weren’t born, our life could have been completely different. So long, dmr.
printf("Bye, world!")
In the same universe, Dart, the structured web programming, was finally unveiled. It’s truly a controversial language since it draws a lot of critics. Seems that liking Dart is a minority stance these days. We just have to wait and see (and might as well grab some popcorns) if Dart manages to deliver what it promises. In particular, it would be interesting to see the use Dart for server-side programming due to some of its interesting concept such as isolate and type checking. In addition, I would not be too shocked if Google has a secret plan to rolls Dart for Android in the near future, that’ll be a nice way to avoid being strangled by Oracle.
Dart fans might also check what Dirk Nowitzki has to say:
Dear tony romo. Don’t worry abt all the critics. I heard that same garbage for a long time. Keep working hard and keep improving.
Meanwhile, iPhone 4S (rumor is that 4S stands “for Steve”) was out. It was very common to see a lot of the new owners speaking to the phone and attempting to do different crazy thing with Siri. There were few hands-on reviews in the past week and I believe we will see more detailed analysis of this new magical box in the coming weeks. Now, the great question is of course whether the timing of a rather long BlackBerry outage was a conspiracy or not?
Last but not least, don’t forget the 15th birthday of KDE! Cornelius has written a very nice wrap up of what happens in the last fifteen years. Is it a crazy ride? I’m sure it is. It’s been a while since Matthias original announcement (read it again, it’s fun!) and the initial version of the desktop environment:
Don’t forget that the ubiquitous WebKit was started as Apple adopted KHTML, its JavaScript engine was also originated from KJS, and the SVG support had some roots from KSVG. Can you list any other traces of other KDE technologies in your geek life?