C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.
Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20.
I’m not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.
For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.
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.
I’ve done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.
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.
I fix things now and then, more often tweak HTML and make scripts to do things.
Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson.
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.
It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software.
Steve Jobs has said that Xwindows is brain-damaged and will disappear in two years. He got it half-right.
Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9.
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.
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.
I’m still uncertain about the language declaration syntax...
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.
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.
Twenty percent of all input forms filled out by people contain bad data.
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.
The notion of a record is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card.