Ken Thompson Quotes

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution.

When in doubt, use brute force.

It's always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.

If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.

We have persistent objects, they're called files.

You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself.

I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.

No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.

SCCS, the source motel! Programs check in and never check out!

I don't think there are many people up in research who have strong ideas about things that they haven't really had experience with.

I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.

The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you.

In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.

In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.

A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.

The steady state of disks is full.

I am a very bottom-up thinker.

FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.

I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft - a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less.

The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden.

There's a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data.

I wanted to avoid, special IO for terminals.

I wanted to separate data from programs, because data and instructions are very different.

Just think, IBM and DEC in the same room, and we did it.

I also have an idea for a book on biodiversity, and why and how we should be conserving it.

On the one hand, the press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.

One is that the perfect garden can be created overnight, which it can't.

So maybe I can go back to being a Gardeners' World addict again.

I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won't have another book finished by next week.

I also enjoy writing my regular column for Organic Gardening magazine, so I may do more of that sort of thing in the future, if anybody wants it!

I wanted to have virtual memory, at least as it's coupled with file systems.

That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.

For most of that time, I've also been a keen gardener, but for many years I failed to make the connection between gardening and science.