Skip to content

Word and Excel and PowerPoint and other Microsoft programs have intimate — one might say promiscuous — knowledge of each others' internals. In Unix, one tries to design programs to operate not specifically with each other, but with programs as yet unthought of.

— Doug McIlroy Doug McIlroy (2003)

Another quote →

More quotes by Doug McIlroy

It's proof that open-source can breed monsters just like the commercial pros.

Doug McIlroy (2013)

This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

Doug McIlroy (2003)

Everything was small... and my heart sinks for Linux when I see the size of it.

Doug McIlroy (2005)

The notion of "intricate and beautiful complexities" is almost an oxymoron. Unix programmers vie with each other for "simple and beautiful" honors — a point that's implicit in these rules, but is well worth making overt.

Doug McIlroy (2003)

All Doug McIlroy quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Doug McIlroy (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.