Dennis Ritchie Quotes

#1. Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20.

Dennis Ritchie

#2. I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.

Dennis Ritchie

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

Dennis Ritchie

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

Dennis Ritchie

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Over the past several years, I've been more in a managerial role.

Dennis Ritchie

#8. For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

Dennis Ritchie

#9. I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.

Dennis Ritchie

#10. With proper design, the features come cheaply. This approach is arduous, but continues to succeed.

Dennis Ritchie

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

Dennis Ritchie

#12. It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software.

Dennis Ritchie

#13. 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

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

Dennis Ritchie

#15. 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

#16. I'm still uncertain about the language declaration syntax ...

Dennis Ritchie

#17. 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.

Dennis Ritchie

#18. 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

#19. The notion of a record is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card.

Dennis Ritchie

#20. The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected ...

Dennis Ritchie

#21. A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do

Dennis Ritchie

#22. 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.

Dennis Ritchie

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks.

Dennis Ritchie

#26. A program designed for inputs from people is usually stressed beyond breaking point by computer-generated inputs.

Dennis Ritchie

#27. Twenty percent of all input forms filled out by people contain bad data.

Dennis Ritchie

#28. 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.

Dennis Ritchie

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

Dennis Ritchie

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.

Dennis Ritchie

#33. Oh, I've seen copies [of Linux Journal] around the terminal room at The
Labs.

Dennis Ritchie

#34. Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor.

Dennis Ritchie

#35. Steve Jobs has said that Xwindows is brain-damamged and will disappear in two years. He got it half-right.

Dennis Ritchie

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

Dennis Ritchie

#37. Unix is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate the simplicity..

Dennis Ritchie