Ken Thompson Quotes

A collection of quotes by Ken Thompson.

Ken Thompson is an American computer scientist who played a monumental role in the development of modern computing. Born in 1943, Thompson co-created the UNIX operating system with Dennis Ritchie while working at Bell Labs during the late 1960s. He also contributed significantly to the development of the B programming language and co-invented the UTF-8 character encoding scheme. Thompson's groundbreaking work laid the foundation for many future technological advancements, influencing the field of computer science immensely. His contributions earned him numerous prestigious awards, including the Turing Award in 1983.

There are no projects per se in the Computing Sciences Resea

There are no projects per se in the Computing Sciences Research Center.

Ken Thompson

Science

You can't trust code that you did not totally create yoursel

You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself.

Ken Thompson

Trust

When in doubt, use brute force.

When in doubt, use brute force.

Ken Thompson


That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been

That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.

Ken Thompson

Beauty

I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of

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.

Ken Thompson

Gardening