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
... with proper design, the features come cheaply. This approach is arduous, but continues to succeed.
C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.
A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do
The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected...
Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks.
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
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.
A program designed for inputs from people is usually stressed beyond breaking point by computer-generated inputs.
For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.
Unix is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate the simplicity..
Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX,
I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.
Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor.