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Friday, September 23, 2016

They further Wrote

There are so so many people who once did something miraculous and life changing and we still forgot them. But life is tend to change and it's okay to forget people after sometime but this guy never even got the recognition he should've got. He is Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie. The man who created or developed the C language.

He died around 7 days later after Steve Jobs died but world didn't even hear of it! Wired magazine wrote an article on this stating-

THE TRIBUTES TO Dennis Ritchie won’t match the river of praise that spilled out over the web after the death of Steve Jobs. But they should.
And then some.
“When Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified. But Dennis had a bigger effect, and the public doesn’t even know who he is,” says Rob Pike, the programming legend and current googler who spent 20 years working across the hall from Ritchie at the famed Bell Labs.

They further wrote-

“Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX,” Pike tells Wired. “The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel — that pretty much the entire Internet runs on — is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they’re not, they’re written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. And all of the network hardware running these programs I can almost guarantee were written in C.
“It’s really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did.”

So in my views he is one of the eminent person whose work was never praised as much it should be.

My conscience calls me to bear witness. I am the voice of the exiled who scream in the desert.


As a medic serving in the German army during World War I, Wegner found himself in Ottoman Turkey, a firsthand witness to the ongoing Armenian Genocide.  Per Wikipedia:

Disobeying orders intended to smother news of the massacres (as the Ottoman Empire and Germany were allies), he gathered information on the massacres, collected documents, annotations, notes, and letters and took hundreds of photographs in the Armenian deportation camps in Deir ez-Zor,[5] which later served to evidence the extent of the atrocities to which the Ottoman Armenians were subjected. At the Ottoman command's request, Wegner was eventually arrested by the Germans and recalled to Germany. While some of his photographs were confiscated and destroyed, he nonetheless succeeded in smuggling out many images of the Armenian persecution by hiding the negatives in his belt.[7]
​​​​The Heartbreaking Story Of Shamsher Khan,The First Indian Olympic Swimmer

It was 1956, and newly independent India was still trying hard to get on its feet. Shamsher Khan, on the other hand, was readying himself to make his country proud in Australia. He was the first Indian swimmer who represented India in 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne.

Shamsher made a national record in 200-meter butterfly in 1954 and broke all records at the national meet in Bangalore in 1955. These achievements earned him a ticket to the qualifying rounds of the Melbourne Summer Olympics of 1956. Not only was he the first ever Indian swimmer to do so but he also secured 5th position in the qualifiers and participated in both breaststroke and butterfly. And there’s not even a single modern-day Indian swimmer to repeat this feat. Matter of fact, no Indian swimmer has ranked as high as Shamsher Khan did in the Olympic qualifiers. He was enlisted in the Indian Army and served in the Indo-China war in 1962 and the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971. 

His achievements were insensitively overlooked. The Indian government sponsored the airfare to Melbourne but it was later deducted from his salary. The pro-athlete ran from pillar to post when his house was ravaged in a cyclone in 1990. Then came the shock that broke his heart, he found out that his name was missing from the Swimming Federation of India’s list of ‘Hall of Famers’. Shamsher suffered a stroke in 2010 and refused to seek medical assistance in order to save money for his family. 83-year-old and suffering because of the government’s insensitivity, Shamsher Khan now lives on a measly pension in his hometown of Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, and refuses to give up no matter what.

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