Any Editing, Software Work, And Mail Is

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.

Obviously, The Person Who Had Most Influence On My Career Was Ken Thompson. Unix Was Basically His, Likewise C's Predecessor, Likewise Much Of The Basis Of Plan 9 (though Rob Pike Was The Real Force In Getting It Together). And In The Meantime Ken Created The First Computer Chess Master And Pretty Much Rewrote The Book On Chess Endgames. He Is Quite A Phenomenon.

Unix Is Simple And Coherent, But It Takes A Genius (or At Any Rate, A Programmer) To Understand And Appreciate Its Simplicity.

Oh, I've Seen Copies [of Linux Journal] Around The Terminal Room At The Labs.

C Is Declining Somewhat In Usage Compared To C++, And Maybe Java, But Perhaps Even More Compared To Higher-level Scripting Languages. It's Still Fairly Strong For The Basic System-type Things.