Quotes By Ken Thompson

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

I am a programmer.

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

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

We have persistant objects, they're called files.

That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.

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.

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

I also have an idea for a book on biodiversity, and why and how we should be conserving it.

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

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

There are no projects per se in the Computing Sciences Research Center.

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

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.

When in doubt, use brute force.

I wanted to avoid, special IO for terminals.

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

I wanted to have virtual memory, at least as it's coupled with file systems.

We tried to avoid, you know, records. We were told over and over that was probably the most serious mistake and the reason was the system would never catch on, because we didn't have records.

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

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

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

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

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

I am a very bottom-up thinker.

So maybe I can go back to being a Gardeners' World addict again.

I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won't have another book finished by next week.