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Ken Thompson Quotes (1943-)
Scientist
About Ken Thompson
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.
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Ken Thompson quotes.
βIt does everything Unix does only less reliably.β
βWe have persistent objects, they're called files.β
βI think the open software movement (and Linux in particular) is laudable.β
βKen 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."β
βYou 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.β
βI am a very bottom-up thinker. If you give me the right kind of Tinker Toys, I can imagine the building. I can sit there and see primitives and recognize their power to build structures a half mile high, if only I had just one more to make it functionally complete. I can see those kinds of things.β
βThe press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids. ... There is obviously a cultural gap. The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same social stigma as breaking into a neighbor's house. It should not matter that the neighbor's door is unlocked.β
βWhen the three of us [Thompson, Rob Pike, and Robert Griesemer] got started, it was pure research. The three of us got together and decided that we hated C++. [laughter] ... [Returning to Go,] we started off with the idea that all three of us had to be talked into every feature in the language, so there was no extraneous garbage put into the language for any reason.β
βAnything new will have to come along with the type of revolution that came along with Unix. Nothing was going to topple IBM until something came along that made them irrelevant. I'm sure they have the mainframe market locked up, but that's just irrelevant. And the same thing with Microsoft: until something comes along that makes them irrelevant, the entry fee is too difficult and they won't be displaced.β
βI used to [look at the Linux source code], for Plan 9. They were always ahead of usβthey just had massively more resources to deal with hardware. So when we'd run across a piece of hardware, I'd look at the Linux drivers for it and write Plan 9 drivers for it. Now I have no reason to look at it. I run Linux. And I occasionally look at code, but rarely, so I can't really tell whether the quality has gotten better or not [since 1999]. But certainly the reliability has gotten better.β
βIn Plan 9 and Inferno, the key ideas are the protocol for communicating between components and the simplification and extension of particular concepts. In Plan 9, the key abstraction is the file systemβanything you can read and write and select by names in a hierarchyβand the protocol exports that abstraction to remote channels to enable distribution. Inferno works similarly, but it has a layer of language interaction above it through the Limbo language interfaceβwhich is like Java, but cleaner I think.β
βUnix was a very small, understandable OS, so people could change it at their will. It would run itselfβyou could type "go" and in a few minutes it would recompile itself. You had total control over the whole system. So it was very beneficial to a lot of people, especially at universities, because it was very hard to teach computing from an IBM end-user point of view. 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.β
βUnix was built for me. I didn't build it as an operating system for other people, I built it to do games, and to do my stuff. I was always into games, games was my thing. I used to play pinball machines, and I would pick the lock in the back of pinball machines. Then I'd study the diagrams that I had. That's where I learned a lot of this kind of logic.(February 18, 2019), The Thompson and Ritchie Story, work: National Inventors Hall of Fame - NIHFβ
βI would try out the [C++] language [at AT&T] as it was being developed and make comments on it. It was part of the work atmosphere there. And you'd write something and then the next day it wouldn't work because the language changed. It was very unstable for a very long period of time. At some point, I said, no, no more. In an interview I said exactly that, that I didn't use it because it wouldn't stay still for two days in a row. When Stroustrup read the interview he came screaming into my room about how I was undermining him and what I said mattered and I said it was a bad language.β
Ken Thompson Quotes by Topic
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Ken Thompson on C++ 3 quotes
βWhen the three of us [Thompson, Rob Pike, and Robert Griesemer] got started, it was pure research. The three of us got together and decided that we hated C++. [laughter] β¦ [Returning to Go,] we started off with the idea that all three of us had to be talked into every feature in the language, so there was no extraneous garbage put into the language for any reason.β
Ken Thompson on Fortran
βFORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.β
Ken Thompson on Unix
Ken Thompson on Social stigma
βThe press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids. ... There is obviously a cultural gap. The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same social stigma as breaking into a neighbor's house. It should not matter that the neighbor's door is unlocked.β
Ken Thompson on Linux
βI've looked at the [source code for Linux] occasionally. I don't look at it as much as I used to. I used to, for Plan 9. They were always ahead of usβthey just had massively more resources to deal with hardware. So when we'd run across a piece of hardware, Iβd look at the Linux drivers for it and write Plan 9 drivers for it. Now I have no reason to look at it. I run Linux.β
What Ken Thompson Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Ken Thompson shared regarding contemporaries.
Ken Thompson on Doug McIlroy
βMcIlroy ... is the smartest of all of us and the least remembered or written down of all of us [programmers at Bell Labs' Computing Techniques Research Department].β
Ken Thompson on Dennis Ritchie
βHe was sharp, he was much more mathematical than I. Once he got an idea, he was almost a bulldog, and he'd just work on it until it happened. We worked very, very closely for very many years.β
Quotes About Ken Thompson
Gain deeper perspective through quotes about Ken Thompson from others.
Dennis Ritchie on Ken Thompson
βKen has always been a problem solver and a tool builder. He is equally excited by games, puzzles, and technology creation, and I don't think he really distinguishes among them.β
Doug McIlroy on Ken Thompson
βRitchie and Thompson made an amazing team; and they played Unix and C like a fine instrument. They sometimes divided up work almost on a subroutine-by-subroutine basis with such rapport that it almost seemed like the work of a single person. In fact, as Dennis has recounted, they once got their signals crossed and both wrote the same subroutine. The two versions did not merely compute the same result, they did it with identical source code! Their output was prodigious. Once I counted how much production code they had written in the preceding year β 100,000 lines! Prodigious didnβt mean slapdash. Ken and Dennis have unerring design sense. They write code that works, code that can be read, code that can evolve.β
About Ken Thompson
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.