[TUHS] Dennis Ritchie's Dissertation

Doug McIlroy doug at cs.dartmouth.edu
Fri Jul 31 22:56:48 AEST 2020


> "My graduate school experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to
> be an expert in the theory of algorithms and also that I liked procedural
> languages better than functional ones."
> 
> Amen to that.  Me too, I tried functional languages and my head hurt.  C
> seems so natural to me.

Dennis made quite a generalization from a sample of one--Lisp,
the only functional language that existed when he was in grad
school. I'm sure he'd agree today that functional languages
shine for spplications rooted in algebraic domains. I
immodestly point to www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/powser.html,
which has nothing to do with Unix, but certainly would have
appealed to Dennis.

Doug


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