Dennis Ritchie Quotes

• 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.

  Dennis Ritchie

• UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

  Dennis Ritchie

• The visible things that have come from the group have been the Plan 9 system and Inferno, but I hasten to say that the ideas and the work have come from colleagues.

  Dennis Ritchie

• 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.

  Dennis Ritchie

• Over the past several years, I’ve been more in a managerial role.

  Dennis Ritchie

• Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson.

  Dennis Ritchie

• I’ve done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.

  Dennis Ritchie

• I’m not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.

  Dennis Ritchie

• I’m just an observer of Java, and where Microsoft wants to go with C# is too early to tell.

  Dennis Ritchie

• I fix things now and then, more often tweak HTML and make scripts to do things.

  Dennis Ritchie

• 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.

  Dennis Ritchie

• For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

  Dennis Ritchie

• C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.

  Dennis Ritchie

• 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.

  Dennis Ritchie

• C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group.

  Dennis Ritchie

• At the same time, much of it seems to have to do with recreating things we or others had already done; it seems rather derivative intellectually; is there a dearth of really new ideas?

  Dennis Ritchie

• 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.

  Dennis Ritchie

• Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9.

  Dennis Ritchie

• 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.

  Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Ritchie (19)

Birth:	9th September, 1941
Death:	12th October, 2011
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Computer Scientist

About

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was born in Bronxville, New York. He 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. He graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics. He was co-author of the book The C Programming Language, and was the 'R' in K&R.

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