Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.
Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks.
I'm still uncertain about the language declaration syntax.
For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.
I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.
Over the past several years, I've been more in a managerial role.
Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX.
Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9
The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected.
Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9.
Twenty percent of all input forms filled out by people contain bad data.
Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20.
Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson.
Oh, I've seen copies [of Linux Journal] around the terminal room at The Labs.
The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
I fix things now and then, more often tweak HTML and make scripts to do things.
I listen to mostly-classical music, but mostly by radio - I'm not an audiophile.
The notion of a record is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card.
For books, I don't read much fiction, but like travel essays and good pop-science.
A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do
I'm just an observer of Java, and where Microsoft wants to go with C# is too early to tell.
I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.
C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.
UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.
... with proper design, the features come cheaply. This approach is arduous, but continues to succeed.
Steve Jobs has said that Xwindows is brain-damamged and will disappear in two years. He got it half-right.
Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor.
A program designed for inputs from people is usually stressed beyond breaking point by computer-generated inputs.
UNIX is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate its simplicity.
It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software.
My father worked for Bell Labs. Hence, I knew very much about the place. I knew it because also he was involved with telephony.
From an operating system research point of view, Unix is if not dead certainly old stuff, and it's clear that people should be looking beyond it.
The True-GNU philosophy is more extreme than I care for, but it certainly laid a foundation for the current scene, as well as providing real software.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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's true that compared with the scene when Unix started, today the ecological niches are fairly full, and fresh new OS ideas are harder to come by, or at least to propagate.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.