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

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.

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.

A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do

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

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