Dennis Ritchie

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication in software design.

B was a stepping stone to C, much like a bicycle to a car.

The best software is invisible; it just works.

Multics taught us what not to do, and Unix what to do.

C gives you all the power but none of the hand-holding.

In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.

The pipe is the original Unix filter; everything flows through it.

Life is too short for proprietary software.

Standards are always compromises; the art is in the balance.

Ken and I built Unix because we were lazy and wanted tools that worked.

Pointers are like jumps in assembly, but safer if you don't misuse them.

The future of computing is in small, portable systems.

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.

Unix philosophy: do one thing well.

C's success is due to its portability and efficiency.

Innovation comes from constraints, not abundance.

The shell is the user's interface to the power of Unix.

Programming is an art form disguised as engineering.

I regret not patenting more, but openness won out.

Arrays in C start at zero because it's efficient, not arbitrary.