Binary, octal, and hexadecimal

Why do computer programmers use binary, octal, and hexadecimal codes?  Binary is good because a computer becomes simpler and more efficient when working in binary, and octal and hexadecimal makes it easier for a human to relate to binary.  Why not decimal?  I'll write another post soon to explain the relationship between binary and decimal, which is less natural than octal/hex.

John McCarthy (1927–2011)

"Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it"

 Yes, the man who saw so much further into the future of computer science has passed away.

Again, I'm personally thankful mostly for the language he invented: LISP.  The only programming language that is truly beautiful.

286

286 pageviews (gee, I wonder how many are spamspiders) reminds me of the time when the Intel 80286 chip was new and we discussed on the programmer networks how we could make use of the "extended" instruction set and the (so-called) multitasking capabilities.  The 286 was probably the last CPU chip in mainstream use that was easy to incorporate in your thinking processes.

Dennis Ritchie (1941-2011)

Dennis Ritchie (DMR) was the designer and implementor of the C language, and (with Ken Thompson) developed the Unix operating system. Unix and C were developed hand in hand: C was modified to make it easier to develop Unix, and Unix gained new utilities as they became implementable in C.

For myself, C wasn't the first language I used, but the one I've used for the longest time so far.

It's also the most influential language in the history of programming languages, almost every language designed and developed since the 1980s owes something to C.

Even apart from this, DMR seems to have been a really nice and exceptionally intelligent man. The world is poorer for his loss.