Home › Authors › Ken Thompson
Ken Thompson Quotes
born 1943 United States
Kenneth Lane Thompson (born 4 February 1943) is a computer scientist and winner of the 1983 Turing Award, together with Dennis Ritchie. He is notable for his work on the Unix operating system.
United States Academics Computer scientists Programmers Also known as: Kenneth L. Thompson, Kenneth Thompson, Kenneth thompson
Random Ken Thompson quote
19 quotes
The press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.
FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.
It does everything Unix does only less reliably.
Plan 9 fortune file (1992)
The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you.
Plan 9 fortune file (1992)
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."
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.
"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."
If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.
Plan 9 fortune file (1992)
There's going to be no serious problem after this.
Plan 9 fortune file (1992)
We have persistent objects, they're called files.
Plan 9 fortune file (1992)
I think the open software movement (and Linux in particular) is laudable.
'Gigabit' seems to mean 600 megabits. It's a VAX gigabit.
Plan 9 fortune file (1992)
Hi, this is Ken. What's the root password?
Plan 9 fortune file (1992)
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 think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.
When in doubt, use brute force.
Unix was small, and you could go through it line by line and understand exactly how it worked. That was the origin of the so-called Unix culture.
In Plan 9, the key abstraction is the file system—anything you can read and write and select by names in a hierarchy—and the protocol exports that abstraction to remote channels to enable distribution.
95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran.
Attributed