Ken Thompson famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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

#Lines #Programming #Throwing
It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution.
-- Ken Thompson

#Criminals #Serious #Hackers
It's always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.
-- Ken Thompson

#Views #Ideas #Brilliant
When in doubt, use brute force.
-- Ken Thompson

#Doubt #Use #Programming
I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.
-- Ken Thompson

#Writing #Thinking #Simple
I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft - a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less.
-- Ken Thompson

#Views #Microsoft #Linux
FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.
-- Ken Thompson

#Race #Choices #Three
If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.
-- Ken Thompson

#Want #Way #Programming
I am a very bottom-up thinker.
-- Ken Thompson

#Thinker #Bottom
We have persistent objects, they're called files.
-- Ken Thompson

#Persistent #Files #Objects
I wanted to separate data from programs, because data and instructions are very different.
-- Ken Thompson

#Data #Different #Separation
The steady state of disks is full.
-- Ken Thompson

#Humorous #States #Steady
SCCS, the source motel! Programs check in and never check out!
-- Ken Thompson

#Humorous #Program #Checks
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.
-- Ken Thompson

#Strong #Thinking #Ideas
The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you.
-- Ken Thompson

#Program #Programming #Server
The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden.
-- Ken Thompson

#Garden #Average #Littles
A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.
-- Ken Thompson

#Bugs #Impossible #Wells
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.
-- Ken Thompson

#Jobs #Reading #Gardening
There's a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data.
-- Ken Thompson

#Power #Data #Executing
In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.
-- Ken Thompson

#Two #Facts #Different
On the one hand, the press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.
-- Ken Thompson

#Movie #Hero #Kids
I wanted to avoid, special IO for terminals.
-- Ken Thompson

#Ios #Special #Wanted
In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.
-- Ken Thompson

#Exercise #College #Games

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