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.

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 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.

Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9.

I’m not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.

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

Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson.

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.

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.

Over the past several years, I’ve been more in a managerial role.

C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.

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.

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.

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.

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 fix things now and then, more often tweak HTML and make scripts to do things.

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 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.

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.