Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson. Unix was basically his, likewise C's predecessor, likewise much of the basis of Plan 9 (though Rob Pike was the real force in getting it together). And in the meantime Ken created the first computer chess master and pretty much rewrote the book on chess endgames. He is quite a phenomenon.

It's true that compared with the scene when Unix started, today the ecological niches are fairly full, and fresh new OS ideas are harder to come by, or at least to propagate.

Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor.

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

I'm just an observer of Java, and where Microsoft wants to go with C# is too early to tell.

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

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