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
Likewise, C managed to escape its original close ties with Unix as a useful tool for writing applications in different environments.
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
It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software.
Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX,
The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected...
True enough that standards bodies themselves have weak teeth, but they do have influence and importance when a language begins to be widely used.
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.
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.
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.
Over the past several years, I've been more in a managerial role.
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?
Oh, I've seen copies [of Linux Journal] around the terminal room at The Labs.
Twenty percent of all input forms filled out by people contain bad data.
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