It’s hard to believe that there was a time when any of these weren’t conventional wisdom, but there was such a time. Unix combines more obvious-in-retrospect engineering design choices than anything else I’ve seen or am likely to see in my lifetime.
Not to take anything away from Ritchie, but Unix got so much right and was so successful that it created a bit of a monoculture, with even some of the bad ideas becoming conventional wisdom.
Herb Sutter (via John Gruber):
Bjarne Stroustrup made an eloquent point about the importance of Ritchie’s contributions to our field: “They said it couldn’t be done, and he did it.”
Update (2011-10-16): More from Lambda.