Top 25 Dennis Ritchie Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.”

— Dennis Ritchie

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

— Dennis Ritchie

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3. “C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.”

— Dennis Ritchie

Featured in: Programming Quotes, IT Quotes

4. “A language that doesn’t have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do.”

— Dennis Ritchie

Featured in: Programming Quotes

5. “Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20.”

— Dennis Ritchie

6. “For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.”

— Dennis Ritchie

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

— Dennis Ritchie

8. “I’m still uncertain about the language declaration syntax...”

— Dennis Ritchie

9. “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.”

— Dennis Ritchie

10. “Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks.”

— Dennis Ritchie

11. “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.”

— Dennis Ritchie

12. “Steve Jobs has said that Xwindows is brain-damamged and will disappear in two years. He got it half-right.”

— Dennis Ritchie

13. “A program designed for inputs from people is usually stressed beyond breaking point by computer-generated inputs.”

— Dennis Ritchie

14. “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.”

— Dennis Ritchie

15. “From an operating system research point of view, Unix is if not dead certainly old stuff, and it’s clear that people should be looking beyond it.”

— Dennis Ritchie

16. “My work was fairly theoretical. It was in recursive function theory. And in particular, hierarchies of functions in terms of computational complexity. I got involved in real computers and programming mainly by being – well, I was interested even as I came to graduate school.”

— Dennis Ritchie

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

— Dennis Ritchie

18. “I’ve done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.”

— Dennis Ritchie

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

— Dennis Ritchie

20. “The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected...”

— Dennis Ritchie

21. “One of the obvious things that went wrong with Multics as a commercial success was just that it was sort of over-engineered in a sense. There was just too much in it.”

— Dennis Ritchie

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

— Dennis Ritchie

23. “It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software.”

— Dennis Ritchie

24. “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.”

— Dennis Ritchie

25. “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.”

— Dennis Ritchie

26. “The notion of a record is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card.”

— Dennis Ritchie

27. “Twenty percent of all input forms filled out by people contain bad data.”

— Dennis Ritchie

28. “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.”

— Dennis Ritchie

29. “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.”

— Dennis Ritchie