Quotes from Ken Thompson

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

Just think -- IBM and DEC in the same room -- and we did it. Makes you feel warm inside.

Maybe I should have screwed up.

SCCS is the source-code motel -- your code checks in but it never checks out.

But I love the teaching: the hard work of a first class, the fun of the second class. Then the misery of the third.

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code

And I knew them by name and reputation. And they were still doing fun things. To me, work was work and these guys weren't working. They were having a good time. Just like school.

When it's hard to work on. I do it much quicker than most people do. I'll throw away code as soon I want to add something to it and I get the feeling that what I have to do to add it is too hard. I'll throw it away and start over and come up with a different partitioning that makes it easy to do whatever I wanted to do. I'm really quick on the trigger for throwing stuff out.

It would be easy to get the idea from all this that Mimosa is some kind of genius, a veritable Einstein among vegetables. But there's no evidence for this at all. The reason all this work has focused on Mimosa is simply that its ability to move (and fast) makes it a convenient experimental subject, which in turn reveals just what a hasty bunch we are; other plants may well be smarter than Mimosa , but until very recently biologists had generally decided that it would take too long to find out.

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

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

We have persistant objects, they're called files.

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

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

In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.

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