Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks.

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

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

... with proper design, the features come cheaply. This approach is arduous, but continues to succeed.

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.

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

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