Dennis Ritchie Quotes

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

C is a razor-sharp tool, with which one can create an elegant and efficient program or a bloody mess.

The problem is, in software design, often the consequences of your decisions don't become apparent for years.

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX. The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel - that pretty much the entire Internet runs on - is written in C.

To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consistent and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge.

Building technical systems involves a lot of hard work and specialized knowledge: languages and protocols, coding and debugging, testing and refactoring.

I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So, whatever it takes to give away my software and get it used, that's great.

I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

Program construction consists of a sequence of refinement steps.

You can’t really understand the challenges involved with any major tech project until you start trying to build it.

Like any well designed software product, Windows is designed, developed and tested as an integrated whole.

In any software work, you have IT consultancy competence required to build the systems.

I love computer programmers. They have a very beautiful definition of complexity as 'the capacity to transmit the maximum information with the minimum data'.

From the point of view of the people who are using the platform, one of the most valuable things about Java is the consistency, the interoperability.

Since its inception, HCL's core focus area has been technology and product development, and hence, we continued to remain in the high end of technology throughout the '90s.

You think NASA is going to be cutting edge, but they've got so many buildings that are just left over from the '60s. It's old.

Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

We can build a better product than Linux.

C++ is designed to allow you to express ideas, but if you don't have ideas or don't have any clue about how to express them, C++ doesn't offer much help.

Of course, C proved indispensible to the developers of all its alternatives. Dig down through enough implementation layers under any of the other languages surveyed here and you will find a core implemented in pure, portable C

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.

Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world