Quotes from Dennis Ritchie

I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.

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

The original version of C did not have structures. So to make tables of objects, process tables and file tables and this tables and that tables, it really was fairly painful.

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

Unix is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity.

The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

For books, I don't read much fiction, but like travel essays and good pop-science.

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

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

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

My father worked for Bell Labs. Hence, I knew very much about the place. I knew it because also he was involved with telephony.

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

I fix things now and then, more often tweak HTML and make scripts to do things.

The first phase of C was - really, it was two phases in short succession of, first, some language changes from B, really adding the type structure without too much change in the syntax, and doing the compiler. The second phase was slower; it all took place within a very few years, but it was a bit slower, so it seemed.

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?

C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group.

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.