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31 quotes by Ken Thompson

Kenneth "Ken" Thompson (born February 4, 1943), commonly referred to as ken in hacker circles, is an American pioneer of computer science. Having worked at Bell Labs for most of his career, Thompson designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating systems. Since...
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In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.

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

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

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

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I wanted to have virtual memory, at least as it's coupled with file systems.

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

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When in doubt, use brute force.

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It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution.

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

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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... →

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You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself.

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I am a programmer.

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I wanted to avoid, special IO for terminals.

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