Science Quote by Dennis Ritchie

Coming from Dennis Ritchie, this is less a surrender than a clear-eyed forecast from the architect of the “old world.” C, in his telling, doesn’t lose because it stops working; it loses because the definition of “central” shifts. The sting is in the double accounting: “absolutely” versus “relatively.” C can remain everywhere in raw volume - embedded systems, kernels, performance-critical code - while becoming less culturally and economically decisive. That’s a scientist’s realism: measure the trend correctly, even if it bruises your legacy.

The subtext is about where power concentrates. C is the language of proximity: to the machine, to memory, to the kinds of mistakes that teach you what computers really are. JavaScript and XML (a very of-its-time pairing) represent proximity to the network and to institutions: browsers, documents, APIs, corporate plumbing. Ritchie is pointing to a world where “the platform” isn’t the operating system so much as the web stack, and where being “central” means being the default interface between people, services, and data.

Context matters: this was an era when the browser was swallowing software, enterprise systems were standardizing on verbose data formats, and “glue” languages were turning into strategic languages. Ritchie’s restraint is the real rhetorical move: no nostalgia, no gatekeeping, just the quiet implication that technical merit doesn’t decide prominence - ecosystems do.