Ken Thompson Quotes

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.

We have persistant objects, they're called files.

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

In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.

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

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

SCCS, the source motel! Programs check in and never check out!

I also enjoy writing my regular column for Organic Gardening magazine, so I may do more of that sort of thing in the future, if anybody wants it!

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.

The steady state of disks is full.

I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft-a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less.

Just think, IBM and DEC in the same room, and we did it.

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

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

For most of that time, I've also been a keen gardener, but for many years I failed to make the connection between gardening and science.

I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.

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.

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

I wanted to avoid, special IO for terminals.

I am a very bottom-up thinker.

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

We have persistent objects, they're called files.

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

A survey of oceanic (i.e. remote) islands found that, as far back as records exist, they have been accumulating alien plants. In 1860 the average oceanic island had less than 1 introduced plant for every 10 natives. By 1940 the ratio was 1 alien for every 2 natives, and today the ratio is about 1:1. Despite all these new arrivals there have been very few extinctions among the original inhabitants, so the number of plant species on such islands has approximately doubled. Thus, although left to themselves remote islands tend to have rather few species (compared to similar continental areas at the same latitude), so many species have been introduced to Hawaii that it now has as many plants as a similar area of Mexico. Moreover, the evidence suggests that remote islands are by no means 'full' of plants, and that there is room for even more alien plants to establish, and thus for total plant diversity to increase: at the current rate the average oceanic island will have 3 aliens for every 2 natives by 2060. Do we have any idea how many different plant species might eventually be able to coexist on an island like Hawaii? No, we don't. Or, to express that conclusion in a more general form, in a report from US ecologists Dov Sax and Steve Gaines: 'we have a relatively poor understanding of the processes that ultimately limit how many species can inhabit any given place or area

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

When in doubt, use brute force.

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

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.

If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.