Dennis Ritchie Quotes
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UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.
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Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson.
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The True-GNU philosophy is more extreme than I care for, but it certainly laid a foundation for the current scene, as well as providing real software.
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The notion of a record is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card.
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It's true that compared with the scene when Unix started, today the ecological niches are fairly full, and fresh new OS ideas are harder to come by, or at least to propagate.
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C is declining somewhat in usage compared to C++, and maybe Java, but perhaps even more compared to higher-level scripting languages. It's still fairly strong for the basic system-type things.
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I fix things now and then, more often tweak HTML and make scripts to do things.
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C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new
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Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson. Unix was basically his, likewise C's predecessor, likewise much of the basis of Plan 9 (though Rob Pike was the real force in getting it together). And in the meantime Ken created the first computer chess master and pretty much rewrote the book on chess endgames. He is quite a phenomenon.
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A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do
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For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.
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At least for the people who send me mail about a new language that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to write a compiler
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I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate
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From an operating system research point of view, Unix is if not dead certainly old stuff, and it's clear that people should be looking beyond it.
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Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks.
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A program designed for inputs from people is usually stressed beyond breaking point by computer-generated inputs.
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I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.
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My work was fairly theoretical. It was in recursive function theory. And in particular, hierarchies of functions in terms of computational complexity. I got involved in real computers and programming mainly by being - well, I was interested even as I came to graduate school.
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When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd.
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I'm just an observer of Java, and where Microsoft wants to go with C# is too early to tell.
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The kind of programming that C provides will probably remain similar absolutely or slowly decline in usage, but relatively, JavaScript or its variants, or XML, will continue to become more central.
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I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time. I'm a home-body and get fatigued by it fairly soon, but enjoy thinking back on experiences when I've returned and then often wish I'd arranged a longer stay in the somewhat exotic place.
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Steve Jobs has said that Xwindows is brain-damamged and will disappear in two years. He got it half-right.
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One of the obvious things that went wrong with Multics as a commercial success was just that it was sort of over-engineered in a sense. There was just too much in it.
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Oh, I've seen copies [of Linux Journal] around the terminal room at The Labs.
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... with proper design, the features come cheaply. This approach is arduous, but continues to succeed.
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I'm still uncertain about the language declaration syntax.
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Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9
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Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor.
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UNIX is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate its simplicity.
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Dennis Ritchie
- Born: September 9, 1941
- Died: October 12, 2011
- Occupation: Computer Scientist
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