Ken Thompson
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.Collection: Gardening
You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself.Collection: Trust
When in doubt, use brute force.
One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.
If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.
In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.
We have persistant objects, they're called files.
I wanted to avoid, special IO for terminals.
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.
I also have an idea for a book on biodiversity, and why and how we should be conserving it.
I wanted to separate data from programs, because data and instructions are very different.
No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.
I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.
The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden.
In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.
A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.
Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.
I am a programmer.
I am a very bottom-up thinker.
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.
I wanted to have virtual memory, at least as it's coupled with file systems.
It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution.
It's always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.
On the one hand, the press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.
One is that the perfect garden can be created overnight, which it can't.
So maybe I can go back to being a Gardeners' World addict again.
That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.
The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you.
There are no projects per se in the Computing Sciences Research Center.
There's a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data.
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.
FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.Collection: Race
I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft - a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less.Collection: Views
We have persistent objects, they're called files.Collection: Persistent
The steady state of disks is full.Collection: Humorous
SCCS, the source motel! Programs check in and never check out!Collection: Humorous
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.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Years
Just think, IBM and DEC in the same room, and we did it.Collection: Thinking
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!Collection: Writing