Quotes About Dennis Ritchie

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At MIT, mostly what I did was documentation. I sort of read things. Wrote some descriptions of various aspects of the file system. Did not really do very much programming at all. At least on Multics.

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.