Ken Thompson Quotes

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

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

I wanted to avoid, special IO for terminals.

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

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

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

I am a very bottom-up thinker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The steady state of disks is full.

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

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

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

When in doubt, use brute force.

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

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

We have persistent objects, they're called files.