46+ Dennis Ritchie Quotes On Education, World And C++

Dennis Ritchie was an American computer scientist who created the C programming language and co-developed the Unix operating system. He was awarded the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was also a pioneer in the field of computer science and is widely regarded as one of the most influential computer scientists of all time. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Dennis Ritchie on education, leadership, life.

Top 10 Dennis Ritchie Quotes

1. UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.
2. The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
3. Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20.
4. C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.
5. C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.
6. For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.
7. A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do
8. ... with proper design, the features come cheaply. This approach is arduous, but continues to succeed.
9. I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.
10. Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX.

Dennis Ritchie Short Quotes

• I'm still uncertain about the language declaration syntax.
• I fix things now and then, more often tweak HTML and make scripts to do things.
• Twenty percent of all input forms filled out by people contain bad data.
• Oh, I've seen copies [of Linux Journal] around the terminal room at The Labs.
• I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.
• Over the past several years, I've been more in a managerial role.
• Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9.
• Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson.
• 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.

Dennis Ritchie Quotes About C++

I'm just an observer of Java, and where Microsoft wants to go with C# is too early to tell. — Dennis Ritchie

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. — Dennis Ritchie

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. — Dennis Ritchie

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. — Dennis Ritchie

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. — Dennis Ritchie

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. — Dennis Ritchie

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. — Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Ritchie Quotes About System

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. — Dennis Ritchie

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. — Dennis Ritchie

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. — Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Ritchie Quotes About Unix

The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected. — Dennis Ritchie

UNIX is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate its simplicity. — Dennis Ritchie

Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor. — Dennis Ritchie

It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software. — Dennis Ritchie

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. — Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Ritchie Famous Quotes And Sayings

A program designed for inputs from people is usually stressed beyond breaking point by computer-generated inputs. — Dennis Ritchie

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. — Dennis Ritchie

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. — Dennis Ritchie

I listen to mostly-classical music, but mostly by radio - I'm not an audiophile. — Dennis Ritchie

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? — Dennis Ritchie

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. — Dennis Ritchie

Steve Jobs has said that Xwindows is brain-damamged and will disappear in two years. He got it half-right. — Dennis Ritchie

I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time. I'm a home-body and get fatigued by it fairly soon, but enjoy thinking back on experiences when I've returned and then often wish I'd arranged a longer stay in the somewhat exotic place. — Dennis Ritchie

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. — Dennis Ritchie

Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks. — Dennis Ritchie

Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson. Unix was basically his, likewise C's predecessor, likewise much of the basis of Plan 9 (though Rob Pike was the real force in getting it together). And in the meantime Ken created the first computer chess master and pretty much rewrote the book on chess endgames. He is quite a phenomenon. — Dennis Ritchie

Life Lessons by Dennis Ritchie

1. Dennis Ritchie's work has demonstrated the importance of collaboration and team work in the development of software and technology.
2. He also showed the value of open source software, which can be shared and improved upon by a community of developers.
3. His work also highlighted the importance of creating systems that are both robust and efficient, which can be achieved through careful design and testing.