Dennis Ritchie
Dennis Ritchie
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was an American computer scientist. He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system. Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. He was the "R" in K&R C, and commonly...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth9 September 1941
CityBronxville, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Oh, I've seen copies [of Linux Journal] around the terminal room at The Labs.
Twenty percent of all input forms filled out by people contain bad data.
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
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
The notion of a record is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card.
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.
I'm still uncertain about the language declaration syntax...
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.
Steve Jobs has said that Xwindows is brain-damamged and will disappear in two years. He got it half-right.
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.
It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software.
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.
I fix things now and then, more often tweak HTML and make scripts to do things.
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.