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
I'm just an observer of Java, and where Microsoft wants to go with C# is too early to tell.
From an operating system research point of view, Unix is if not dead certainly old stuff, and it's clear that people should be looking beyond it.
I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.
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.
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.
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.
It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software.
Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9
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.
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.
I'm still uncertain about the language declaration syntax...
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.