The visible things that have come from the group have been the Plan 9 system and Inferno, but I hasten to say that the ideas and the work have come from colleagues.

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd.

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

C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.

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.

The kind of programming that C provides will probably remain similar absolutely or slowly decline in usage, but relatively, JavaScript or its variants, or XML, will continue to become more central.

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

A new release of Plan 9 happened in June, and at about the same time a new release of the Inferno system, which began here, was announced by Vita Nuova.

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

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 fix things now and then, more often tweak HTML and make scripts to do things.

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.

C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new.

Over the past several years, I've been more in a managerial role.