Ken Thompson
Ken Thompson
Kenneth Lane "Ken" Thompson, 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 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-invented the Go...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth4 February 1943
CountryUnited States of America
I am a very bottom-up thinker.
FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.
No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.
I wanted to separate data from programs, because data and instructions are very different.
A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.
I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.
The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you.
You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself.
It's always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.
We have persistent objects, they're called files.
In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.
When in doubt, use brute force.
One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.
The steady state of disks is full.