Dennis Ritchie Quotes
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C has the power of assembly language and the convenience of … assembly language.
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The working examples of important new systems seem to have come either from entrepreneurial efforts (Visicalc is a good example) or from large companies, like Bell Labs and most especially Xerox, that were much involved with computers and could afford research into them, but did not regard them as their primary business.
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I fix things now and then, more often tweak HTML and make scripts to do things.
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I'm just an observer of Java, and where Microsoft wants to go with C# is too early to tell.
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I don’t really distinguish between Linux and things that are more or less direct descendants of Unix. I think they’re all the same at some level. Often, people ask me, 'Do you feel jealous about Linux being the big thing.' And the answer is no, for the same reason. I think they’re the same.
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Another danger is that commercial pressures of one sort or another will divert the attention of the best thinkers from real innovation to exploitation of the current fad, from prospecting to mining a known lode.
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Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9.
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What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication.
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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.
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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.
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Life's a bitch and then your feet wear down.
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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.
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UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.
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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.
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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?
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Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson.
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I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.
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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.
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Over the past several years, I've been more in a managerial role.
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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.
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C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.
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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.
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I think the Linux phenomenon is quite delightful, because it draws so strongly on the basis that Unix provided. Linux seems to be the among the healthiest of the direct Unix derivatives, though there are also the various BSD systems as well as the more official offerings from the workstation and mainframe manufacturers.
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C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.