 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. |
| Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around. |
| 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 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? |
| 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. |
| Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9. |
| 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. |
| UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity. |
| 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. |
| For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace. |
| I fix things now and then, more often tweak HTML and make scripts to do things. |
| 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. |
