C and Unix have exhibited remarkable stability, popularity, and longevity in the past three decades. How do you explain that unusual phenomenon?
Dennis Ritchie: Somehow, both hit some sweet spots. The longevity is a bit remarkable — I began to observe a while ago that both have been around, in not astonishingly changed form, for well more half the lifetime of commercial computers. This must have to do with finding the right point of abstraction of computer hardware for implementation of the applications. The basic Unix idea — a hierarchical file system with simple operations on it (create/open/read/write/delete with I/O operations based on just descriptor/buffer/count) — wasn’t new even in 1970, but has proved to be amazingly adaptable in many ways. Likewise, C managed to escape its original close ties with Unix as a useful tool for writing applications in different environments. Even more than Unix, it is a pragmatic tool that seems to have flown at the right height. Both Unix and C gained from accidents of history. We picked the very popular PDP-11 during the 1970s, then the VAX during the early 1980s. [See Resources for l
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