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
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.
Unix is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate the simplicity..
For books, I don't read much fiction, but like travel essays and good pop-science.
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
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.
I listen to mostly-classical music, but mostly by radio - I'm not an audiophile.
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.
As a general phenomenon, I think they're great, but they suffer from much the same struggles and competition that the proprietary ones did and do.
Likewise, C managed to escape its original close ties with Unix as a useful tool for writing applications in different environments.
I'm not picking a winner here, but higher-level ways of instructing machines will continue to occupy more of the center of the stage.
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.
True enough that standards bodies themselves have weak teeth, but they do have influence and importance when a language begins to be widely used.
We really didn't buy it thinking we'd have this enormous investment,
UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.