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
For books, I don't read much fiction, but like travel essays and good pop-science.
I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.
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
Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20.
It's true that compared with the scene when Unix started, today the ecological niches are fairly full, and fresh new OS ideas are harder to come by, or at least to propagate.
A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do
C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.
C is declining somewhat in usage compared to C++, and maybe Java, but perhaps even more compared to higher-level scripting languages. It's still fairly strong for the basic system-type things.
The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.
I listen to mostly-classical music, but mostly by radio - I'm not an audiophile.
C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.
... with proper design, the features come cheaply. This approach is arduous, but continues to succeed.
The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected...