The only way to write complex software that won't fall on its face is to hold its global complexity down - to build it out of simple pieces connected by well-defined interfaces, so that most problems are local and you can have some hope of fixing or optimizing a part without breaking the whole

Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

Of course, C proved indispensible to the developers of all its alternatives. Dig down through enough implementation layers under any of the other languages surveyed here and you will find a core implemented in pure, portable C

For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.

That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color.

A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.

If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.