Alan Sypert Quotes

Likewise, C managed to escape its original close ties with Unix as a useful tool for writing applications in different environments.

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?

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

I`ve done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.

I`m not picking a winner here, but higher-level ways of instructing machines will continue to occupy more of the center of the stage.

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.

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.

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.

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

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

True enough that standards bodies themselves have weak teeth, but they do have influence and importance when a language begins to be widely used.

As a general phenomenon, I think they`re great, but they suffer from much the same struggles and competition that the proprietary ones did and do.

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

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.

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