Quotes by Dennis Ritchie

About 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 known by his username dmr.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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...

Dennis Ritchie

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

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

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

Dennis Ritchie

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

Dennis Ritchie

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

Dennis Ritchie

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

Dennis Ritchie

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

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

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

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

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

Dennis Ritchie

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

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

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

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

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

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

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

Author Bio

  • NameDennis Ritchie
  • DescriptionAmerican computer scientist
  • AliasesDennis MacAlistair Ritchie; A. Rit?i; dmr; Dennis M. Ritchie
  • BornSeptember 9, 1941
  • DiedOctober 12, 2011
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionComputer Scientist; Programmer; Writer
  • AwardsTuring Award; National Medal Of Technology And Innovation; Harold Pender Award