All Quotes by Ken Thompson
“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.”
“That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.”
“You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.”
“The press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids. ... There is obviously a cultural gap. The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same social stigma as breaking into a neighbor's house. It should not matter that the neighbor's door is unlocked.”
“I've seen [visual] editors like that, but I don't feel a need for them. I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing.”
“Ken Thompson was once asked what he would do differently if he were redesigning the UNIX system. His reply: "I'd spell creat with an e."”
“grep was a private command of mine for quite a while before i made it public.”
“When in doubt, use brute force.”
“We have persistent objects, they're called files.”
“If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.”
“The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you.”
“Hi, this is Ken. What's the root password?”
“'Gigabit' seems to mean 600 megabits. It's a VAX gigabit.”
“There's going to be no serious problem after this.”
“It does everything Unix does only less reliably.”
“I am a very bottom-up thinker. If you give me the right kind of Tinker Toys, I can imagine the building. I can sit there and see primitives and recognize their power to build structures a half mile high, if only I had just one more to make it functionally complete. I can see those kinds of things.”
“I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.”
“Anything new will have to come along with the type of revolution that came along with Unix. Nothing was going to topple IBM until something came along that made them irrelevant. I'm sure they have the mainframe market locked up, but that's just irrelevant. And the same thing with Microsoft: until something comes along that makes them irrelevant, the entry fee is too difficult and they won't be displaced.”
“I think the open software movement (and Linux in particular) is laudable.”
“I do believe that in a race, it is naive to think Linux has a hope of making a dent against Microsoft starting from way behind with a fraction of the resources and amateur labor. (I feel the same about Unix.)”
“I must say the Linux community is a lot nicer than the Unix community. A negative comment on Unix would warrant death threats. With Linux, it is like stirring up a nest of butterflies.”
“I used to [look at the Linux source code], for Plan 9. They were always ahead of us—they just had massively more resources to deal with hardware. So when we'd run across a piece of hardware, I'd look at the Linux drivers for it and write Plan 9 drivers for it. Now I have no reason to look at it. I run Linux. And I occasionally look at code, but rarely, so I can't really tell whether the quality has gotten better or not [since 1999]. But certainly the reliability has gotten better.”
“When the three of us [Thompson, Rob Pike, and Robert Griesemer] got started, it was pure research. The three of us got together and decided that we hated C++. [laughter] ... [Returning to Go,] we started off with the idea that all three of us had to be talked into every feature in the language, so there was no extraneous garbage put into the language for any reason.”