Ken Thompson: Going

Ken Thompson is American computer scientist, creator of the Unix operating system. Explore interesting quotes on going.

Ken Thompson: 56 quotes2 likes

“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.”

Ken Thompson

"Unix and Beyond: An Interview with Ken Thompson," 1999
Context: Unix was a very small, understandable OS, so people could change it at their will. It would run itself—you 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.

“When 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.”

Ken Thompson

Ken Thompson, talking about the origins of the Go programming language <br class="br"> Dr. Dobb's: Interview with Ken Thompson, 18 May 2011, 7 February 2014 http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/interview-with-ken-thompson/229502480, <br class="br">"Interview with Ken Thompson", 2011

“I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft — a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less. I don't think it will be very successful in the long run. I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically. My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. In a non-PC environment, it just won't hold up. If you're using it on a single box, that's one thing. But if you want to use Linux in firewalls, gateways, embedded systems, and so on, it has a long way to go.”

Ken Thompson

"Unix and Beyond: An Interview with Ken Thompson," 1999

“Anything 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.”

Ken Thompson

"Unix and Beyond: An Interview with Ken Thompson," 1999

“There's going to be no serious problem after this.”

Ken Thompson

Plan 9 fortune file (1992)

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

Ken Thompson

Plan 9 fortune file (1992)