Dennis Ritchie Quotes

I'm just an observer of Java, and where Microsoft wants to go with C# is too early to tell.

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.

With proper design, the features come cheaply. This approach is arduous, but continues to succeed.

A new release of Plan 9 happened in June, and at about the same time a new release of the Inferno system, which began here, was announced by Vita Nuova.

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.

I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.

Twenty percent of all input forms filled out by people contain bad data.

Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9.

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor.

It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software.

A program designed for inputs from people is usually stressed beyond breaking point by computer-generated inputs.

The visible things that have come from the group have been the Plan 9 system and Inferno, but I hasten to say that the ideas and the work have come from colleagues.

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.

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.

I'm still uncertain about the language declaration syntax ...

The notion of a record is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card.

The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected ...

Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson.

Steve Jobs has said that Xwindows is brain-damamged and will disappear in two years. He got it half-right.

At the same time, much of it seems to have to do with recreating things we or others had already done; it seems rather derivative intellectually; is there a dearth of really new ideas?

A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do

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.

C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.

Unix is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate the simplicity..