Dennis Ritchie

The first phase of C was - really, it was two phases in short succession of, first, some language changes from B, really adding the type structure without too much change in the syntax, and doing the compiler. The second phase was slower; it all took place within a very few years, but it was a bit slower, so it seemed. ”

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. ”

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

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? ”

At MIT, mostly what I did was documentation. I sort of read things. Wrote some descriptions of various aspects of the file system. Did not really do very much programming at all. At least on Multics. ”

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace. ”

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. ”

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

The original version of C did not have structures. So to make tables of objects, process tables and file tables and this tables and that tables, it really was fairly painful. ”

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. ”