I read PCWorld Vietnam this morning, one of a few IT – magazines in this country that seem somewhat serious about its content and don't rush for the script kiddie stuff. This month's issue features two article about three tragedy loss of the IT world this year. Steve Jobs' works were highlighted in an 8 pages long article with lots of pictures while John McCarthy and Dennis Ritchie was put together in an 2 pages only article with two faces (of them) in it, We must admit that two pages was much nicer than what other magazine would give them but that was it, only two pages.
I put an status on facebook and an – so called – iFan said that I would not understand because I don't use iProduct. Then it strike me, what we, future engineer and scientist of this country, was destined to?
We who committed this techy path is following the footstep of McCarthy and Ritchie, let's be known that may be not a single one of us will ever be able to accomplish as great a job as what they did. But even if we will we was destined to be poorer than Bill and Steve, to be inferior as a public figure, to be less missed when we pass away. Be sad as much as you want, but that was what destiny await us and we can't change that. For Steve to be able to bring iPhone to the world, many engineers spent many sleepless night working hard. I doubt any iFan could remember the name of any of those engineers.
The destiny is settled, but what we can change is our attitude. Let us all aware that we are the one who made the whole things possible. Unix set the standard for modern operating system and almost every operating system was written in C or its variants. Without McCarthy and Ritchie there will be no Windows, no MacOS, no iOS, no linux, no android, no anything. They are great man and they will be missed, at least among the rank of engineer and scientist they will be missed.
There are great heroes, but the greatest hero is the one who doesn't have our recognition.