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 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

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.

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

I listen to mostly-classical music, but mostly by radio - I'm not an audiophile.

I'm still uncertain about the language declaration syntax.

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