Science Quote by Dennis Ritchie

There is a quiet shiv of irony in Ritchie thanking his lucky stars that C wasn’t forged in the open-commentary furnace we now treat as default. It’s not anti-democratic so much as anti-cacophony: a programmer’s version of “too many cooks,” sharpened by the reality that language design isn’t a town hall. It’s metallurgy. A language gets strong not by absorbing every opinion, but by being stress-tested against real constraints: machines, compilers, budgets, deadlines, and the stubborn physics of hardware.

The specific intent is partly defensive. By the time Ritchie is reading “suggestions for where C should go,” C has already become an institution, and institutions attract would-be caretakers who confuse preference with necessity. His line draws a boundary between evolutionary maintenance and ideological reinvention. The subtext: crowds optimize for discourse, not coherence. They reward novelty, purity, and feature shopping; they rarely reward the boring discipline of leaving things out.

Context matters. C was shaped at Bell Labs in an era when a small group could make high-stakes decisions fast, and when portability and simplicity were not branding slogans but survival tactics. Ritchie’s gratitude reads like an oblique critique of standards committees, flame wars, and the early internet’s confidence machine. The wit is that he’s “giving thanks” not for genius, but for governance: fewer voices, clearer tradeoffs, better tools. In a culture that treats openness as an automatic virtue, he’s reminding us that “worldwide crowd” is not a design principle. It’s a source of entropy.