Programmer
February 4, 1943
inducted in the class of 2004
Notable accomplishments:
- Co-developed (with Dennis Ritchie) the Unix operating system (1971)
- Co-developed (with Ritchie) the B programming language (1969)
- Led design of the Plan 9 From Bell Labs operating system (1992)
- Co-designed (with Robert Griesemer and Rob Pike) the Go programming language (2009)
Quotes:
“I am a very bottom-up thinker. If you give me the right kind of Tinker Toys, I can imagine the building. I can sit there and see primitives and recognize their power to build structures a half mile high, if only I had just one more to make it functionally complete. I can see those kinds of things. The converse is true, too, I think. I can’t — from the building — imagine the Tinker Toys. When I see a top-down description of a system or language that has infinite libraries described by layers and layers, all I just see is a morass. I can’t get a feel for it. I can’t understand how the pieces fit; I can’t understand something presented to me that’s very complex. Maybe I do what I do because if I built anything more complicated, I
couldn’t understand it. I really must break it down into little pieces.” (Interview with IEEE Computer magazine, 1999)
Suggested reading:
“Unix: A History and a Memoir” by Brian Kernighan (2019)
Learn more:
Inductee profile at the A.M. Turing Award