Ken Thompson Quotes

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

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

When in doubt, use brute force.

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

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

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

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.

We have persistent objects, they're called files.

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

I am a very bottom-up thinker.

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

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

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

The steady state of disks is full.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I wanted to avoid, special IO for terminals.

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