Thing Beauty Quotes by Ken Thompson

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

— Ken Thompson

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

— Ken Thompson

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

— Ken Thompson

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.

— Ken Thompson

I am a programmer.

— Ken Thompson

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

— Ken Thompson

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

— Ken Thompson

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

— Ken Thompson

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

— Ken Thompson

Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.

— Ken Thompson

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

— Ken Thompson

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

We tried to avoid, you know, records. We were told over and over that was probably the most serious mistake and the reason was…

— Ken Thompson

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

— Ken Thompson

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

— Ken Thompson