For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

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.

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

For books, I don't read much fiction, but like travel essays and good pop-science.

I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.

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.

Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9