Ken Thompson Quotes

32 quotes in 330 categories

• 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.
• A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.
• I also have an idea for a book on biodiversity, and why and how we should be conserving it.
• I am a programmer.
• I am a very bottom-up thinker.
• I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.
• I wanted to avoid, special IO for terminals.
• I wanted to separate data from programs, because data and instructions are very different.
• If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.
• 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.
• No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.
• On the one hand, the press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.
• That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.
• The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden.
• There are no projects per se in the Computing Sciences Research Center.
• Unauthorized access to computer systems is already a serious crime in a few states and is currently being addressed in many more state legislatures as…
• Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.

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