Ken Thompson quotes
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“One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.”
-- Ken Thompson -
“It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution.”
-- Ken Thompson -
“It's always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.”
-- Ken Thompson -
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“I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.”
-- Ken ThompsonSource : "Unix and Beyond: An Interview with Ken Thompson". Computer 32 (5), (pp. 58-64), May 1999.
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“I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft - a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less.”
-- Ken ThompsonSource : "Unix and Beyond: An Interview with Ken Thompson". Computer 32 (5), (pp. 58-64), May 1999.
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“FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.”
-- Ken ThompsonSource : 1983 Turing Award Lecture, "Communications of the ACM" 27 (8), (pp. 761-763), August 1984.
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“If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.”
-- Ken Thompson -
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“I am a very bottom-up thinker.”
-- Ken ThompsonSource : "Unix and Beyond: An Interview with Ken Thompson". Computer 32 (5), (pp. 58-64), May 1999.
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“We have persistent objects, they're called files.”
-- Ken Thompson -
“I wanted to separate data from programs, because data and instructions are very different.”
-- Ken Thompson -
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“SCCS, the source motel! Programs check in and never check out!”
-- 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 -
“The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you.”
-- Ken Thompson -
“The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden.”
-- Ken Thompson -
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“A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.”
-- 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.”
-- Ken Thompson -
“There's a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data.”
-- Ken Thompson -
“In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.”
-- Ken Thompson -
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“On the one hand, the press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.”
-- Ken Thompson -
“I wanted to avoid, special IO for terminals.”
-- Ken Thompson -
“In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.”
-- Ken Thompson
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