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
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
The notion of a record is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card.
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.
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.
Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson.
I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.
Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX,
The True-GNU philosophy is more extreme than I care for, but it certainly laid a foundation for the current scene, as well as providing real software.
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..
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
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