Dennis Ritchie Quotes


"I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Time)

"Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Career, Influence)

"Over the past several years, I've been more in a managerial role."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Past, Years)

"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."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Being, Machines, Unix)

"I'm just an observer of Java, and where Microsoft wants to go with C# is too early to tell."
- Dennis Ritchie
"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."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Successful, Development, Unity)

"I fix things now and then, more often tweak HTML and make scripts to do things."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Now)

"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."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: People, Advice, Language, Mail)

"Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Work, Mail, Software)

"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."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Time, June)

"For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Technology, Will)

"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."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Programming, Will)

"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."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Control, Difficulty, Fate, Language, Open)

"C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Will)

"I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Growing up)

"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."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Advice)

"UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Genius, Simplicity, Unix)

"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."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Work, Ideas)