Dennis Ritchie Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

“I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”