39+ Ken Thompson Quotes On Culture, Education And Trust

Ken Thompson was an American pioneer of computer science. He was a co-creator of the UNIX operating system and the B programming language, and was one of the earliest developers of the Plan 9 operating system. Thompson was awarded the Turing Award in 1983 for his work, and was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 1998. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Ken Thompson on leadership, culture, education.

Top 10 Ken Thompson Quotes

1. One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.
2. It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution.
3. No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.
4. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself.
5. When in doubt, use brute force.
6. I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.
7. 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.
8. The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you.
9. In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.
10. The steady state of disks is full.

Ken Thompson Short Quotes

• FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.
• I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft - a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less.
• There's a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data.
• Just think, IBM and DEC in the same room, and we did it.
• I am a programmer.
• SCCS, the source motel! Programs check in and never check out!
• That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.
• We have persistant objects, they're called files.
• I wanted to have virtual memory, at least as it's coupled with file systems.
• I am a very bottom-up thinker.

Ken Thompson Quotes About Garden

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

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. — Ken Thompson

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

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

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! — Ken Thompson

Ken Thompson Quotes About Idea

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

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

Ken Thompson Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Ken Thompson

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

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

Unauthorized access to computer systems is already a serious crime in a few states and is currently being addressed in many more state legislatures as well as Congress. — Ken Thompson

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. — Ken Thompson

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

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

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

I wanted to avoid, special IO for terminals. — Ken Thompson

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

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

Life Lessons by Ken Thompson

1. Ken Thompson's work has shown us the importance of collaboration in solving complex problems. He was an early pioneer in the field of computer science, and his work on the UNIX operating system has been influential in the development of modern computing.
2. Ken Thompson's work also highlights the importance of open source software, as his contributions to UNIX were made available to the public for free. This has allowed for the continued development of the UNIX system, and has enabled the creation of many other open source software projects.
3. Finally, Ken Thompson's work has demonstrated the power of abstract thinking and problem solving. His work on the UNIX system was based on a set of principles, rather than a specific set of instructions, which allowed for the system to be adapted and improved