"For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace"
About this Quote
C’s stubborn longevity isn’t a nostalgic flex; it’s a prediction about power. When Dennis Ritchie says “For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace,” he’s drawing a bright line between the parts of computing that can chase fashion and the parts that can’t afford to. “Infrastructure” here means the hidden load-bearing beams: operating systems, compilers, runtimes, device drivers, networking stacks, embedded firmware. The places where failure isn’t a bug report; it’s a bricked device, a security breach, a downed service.
The intent is almost understated to the point of mischief. Ritchie isn’t claiming C is the prettiest or safest language; he’s saying it occupies a strategic layer where switching costs compound. C’s advantage is not just speed. It’s that it maps cleanly onto hardware, has predictable performance, and serves as the lingua franca for linking everything else together. Once a platform’s core interfaces are defined in C (APIs, ABIs, calling conventions), C becomes less a language than a treaty. You can write the shiny parts in something newer, but you still end up shaking hands with C at the border.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the idea that better abstractions automatically win. In infrastructure, “better” has to beat “already deployed,” “audited,” “portable,” and “understood by millions.” Ritchie is speaking from the inside of that machine: co-creator of Unix and C, watching waves of languages promise replacement while the world keeps rebuilding its foundations with the same blunt, reliable tools. C persists not because culture lacks imagination, but because infrastructure rewards conservatism with survival.
The intent is almost understated to the point of mischief. Ritchie isn’t claiming C is the prettiest or safest language; he’s saying it occupies a strategic layer where switching costs compound. C’s advantage is not just speed. It’s that it maps cleanly onto hardware, has predictable performance, and serves as the lingua franca for linking everything else together. Once a platform’s core interfaces are defined in C (APIs, ABIs, calling conventions), C becomes less a language than a treaty. You can write the shiny parts in something newer, but you still end up shaking hands with C at the border.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the idea that better abstractions automatically win. In infrastructure, “better” has to beat “already deployed,” “audited,” “portable,” and “understood by millions.” Ritchie is speaking from the inside of that machine: co-creator of Unix and C, watching waves of languages promise replacement while the world keeps rebuilding its foundations with the same blunt, reliable tools. C persists not because culture lacks imagination, but because infrastructure rewards conservatism with survival.
Quote Details
| Topic | Coding & Programming |
|---|
More Quotes by Dennis
Add to List
