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

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.

UNIX is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate its simplicity.

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

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

C is declining somewhat in usage compared to C++, and maybe Java, but perhaps even more compared to higher-level scripting languages. It's still fairly strong for the basic system-type things.

I'm still uncertain about the language declaration syntax.