Dennis Ritchie

The most important thing is to be pragmatic.

The C language is not a 'high-level' language in the sense of Pascal or Ada, nor is it a 'low-level' language in the sense of assembly language. It is a 'middle-level' language.

UNIX was not designed to be a 'user-friendly' system. It was designed to be a 'programmer-friendly' system.

The success of C and Unix is a testament to the power of simplicity and elegance in design.

We wanted to make a system that we ourselves would like to use.

The design of C and Unix was driven by practical considerations, not by theoretical purity.

One of the things that made Unix successful was that it was small enough that one person could understand the whole thing.

The power of a system comes from its ability to combine simple tools in powerful ways.

C is a language that allows you to shoot yourself in the foot, but it also allows you to do things that are impossible in other languages.

The most important thing in a programming language is that it be useful.

We were trying to build a system that was useful for us, and it turned out to be useful for a lot of other people too.

The elegance of Unix is in its uniformity.

C is a language that gives the programmer a lot of control.

The development of Unix was a very iterative process.

We didn't set out to create a revolution, we just wanted to make a better tool.

The beauty of Unix is that it's a collection of small, powerful tools that can be combined in many ways.

C is a language that allows you to get close to the hardware.

The success of Unix shows that a small team can do great things.

We were trying to make a system that was easy to port to different machines.

The philosophy of Unix is to do one thing well.