Dennis Ritchie
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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth9 September 1941
CityBronxville, NY
CountryUnited States of America
A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do
C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.
C is declining somewhat in usage compared to C++, and maybe Java, but perhaps even more compared to higher-level scripting languages. It's still fairly strong for the basic system-type things.
C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.
The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.
As a general phenomenon, I think they're great, but they suffer from much the same struggles and competition that the proprietary ones did and do.
I'm not picking a winner here, but higher-level ways of instructing machines will continue to occupy more of the center of the stage.