Ken Thompson: Quotes about thinking

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

Ken Thompson: 56 quotes2 likes

“[C++] certainly has its good points. But by and large I think it's a bad language. It does a lot of things half well and it’s just a garbage heap of ideas that are mutually exclusive. Everybody I know, whether it’s personal or corporate, selects a subset and these subsets are different. So it’s not a good language to transport an algorithm—to say, "I wrote it; here, take it." It’s way too big, way too complex. And it’s obviously built by a committee. Stroustrup campaigned for years and years and years, way beyond any sort of technical contributions he made to the language, to get it adopted and used. And he sort of ran all the standards committees with a whip and a chair. And he said "no" to no one. He put every feature in that language that ever existed. It wasn't cleanly designed—it was just the union of everything that came along. And I think it suffered drastically from that.”

Ken Thompson; cited in
"Coders At Work", 2009

“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.”

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

“I do believe that in a race, it is naive to think Linux has a hope of making a dent against Microsoft starting from way behind with a fraction of the resources and amateur labor.”

I feel the same about Unix.
"Ken Thompson clarifies matters", 1999

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

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

“I think the open software movement (and Linux in particular) is laudable.”

"Ken Thompson clarifies matters", 1999