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

Dennis Ritchie

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Dennis Ritchie
Age: 70 †
Born: 1941
Born: September 9
Died: 2011
Died: October 12
Computer Scientist
Mathematician
Programmer
Writer
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie
A. Ritči
dmr
Dennis Ritchie
Programming
Simplicity
Basically
Computer
Genius
System
Unix
Simple
Operating
Understand
Geek

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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.
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Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson.
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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.
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Oh, I've seen copies [of Linux Journal] around the terminal room at The Labs.
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I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.
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I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.
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The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected.
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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.
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For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.
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Steve Jobs has said that Xwindows is brain-damamged and will disappear in two years. He got it half-right.
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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.
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For books, I don't read much fiction, but like travel essays and good pop-science.
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UNIX is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate its simplicity.
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I listen to mostly-classical music, but mostly by radio - I'm not an audiophile.
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A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do
Dennis Ritchie
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Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20.
Dennis Ritchie
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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
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Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX.
Dennis Ritchie
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C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.
Dennis Ritchie
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Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor.
Dennis Ritchie