Doug McIlroy Quotes (6 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Doug McIlroy: 6 quotes 0 likes

Famous Doug McIlroy Quotes

“It's proof that open-source can breed monsters just like the commercial pros.”

Doug McIlroy

Doug McIlroy (2013). In their own words: Unix pioneers remember the good times http://www.networkworld.com/article/2168942/servers/in-their-own-words--unix-pioneers-remember-the-good-times.html
Context: I don't know the counts of Unix and Linux servers. I do know that my heart sinks whenever I look under the hood in Linux. It is has been so overfed by loving hands. Over 240 system calls! Gigabytes of source! A C compiler with a 250-page user manual (not counting the language definition)! A simple page turner, 'less,' has over 40 options and 60 commands! It's proof that open-source can breed monsters just like the commercial pros. Miraculously, though, this monster works.

“Everything was small… and my heart sinks for Linux when I see the size of it.”

Doug McIlroy

Doug McIlroy (2005). Ancestry of Linux — How the Fun Began https://archive.org/details/DougMcIlroy_AncestryOfLinux_DLSLUG
Context: Everything was small... and my heart sinks for Linux when I see the size of it. [... ] The manual page, which really used to be a manual page, is now a small volume, with a thousand options... We used to sit around in the Unix Room saying, 'What can we throw out? Why is there this option?' It's often because there is some deficiency in the basic design — you didn't really hit the right design point. Instead of adding an option, think about what was forcing you to add that option.

“Word and Excel and PowerPoint and other Microsoft programs have intimate — one might say promiscuous — knowledge of each others' internals. In Unix, one tries to design programs to operate not specifically with each other, but with programs as yet unthought of.”

Doug McIlroy

Doug McIlroy (2003). The Art of Unix Programming: The Elements of Operating-System Style http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch03s01.html

“The notion of "intricate and beautiful complexities" is almost an oxymoron. Unix programmers vie with each other for "simple and beautiful" honors — a point that's implicit in these rules, but is well worth making overt.”

Doug McIlroy

Doug McIlroy (2003). The Art of Unix Programming: Basics of the Unix Philosophy http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html

“Ritchie 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 − 100,000 lines! Prodigious didn’t mean slapdash. Ken and Dennis have unerring design sense. They write code that works, code that can be read, code that can evolve.”

Doug McIlroy

Doug McIlroy (2011). Remarks for Japan Prize award ceremony for Dennis Ritchie, May 19, 2011, Murray Hill, NJ http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/dmr.pdf