Ken Thompson > Quotes

“I’m glad someone’s finally giving ed the attention it deserves.”
―  Ken Thompson

“One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code”
― Ken Thompson

“You should do well but not really good. And the reason is that in the time it takes you to go from well to really good, Moore’s law has already surpassed you. You can pick up 10 percent but while you’re picking up that 10 percent, computers have gotten twice as fast and maybe with some other stuff that matters more for optimization, like caches. I think it’s largely a waste of time to do really well. It’s really hard; you generate as many bugs as you fix. You should stop, not take that extra 100 percent of time to do 10 percent of the work.”
― Ken Thompson

“A survey of oceanic (i.e. remote) islands found that, as far back as records exist, they have been accumulating alien plants. In 1860 the average oceanic island had less than 1 introduced plant for every 10 natives. By 1940 the ratio was 1 alien for every 2 natives, and today the ratio is about 1:1. Despite all these new arrivals there have been very few extinctions among the original inhabitants, so the number of plant species on such islands has approximately doubled. Thus, although left to themselves remote islands tend to have rather few species (compared to similar continental areas at the same latitude), so many species have been introduced to Hawaii that it now has as many plants as a similar area of Mexico. Moreover, the evidence suggests that remote islands are by no means ‘full’ of plants, and that there is room for even more alien plants to establish, and thus for total plant diversity to increase: at the current rate the average oceanic island will have 3 aliens for every 2 natives by 2060. Do we have any idea how many different plant species might eventually be able to coexist on an island like Hawaii? No, we don’t. Or, to express that conclusion in a more general form, in a report from US ecologists Dov Sax and Steve Gaines: ‘we have a relatively poor understanding of the processes that ultimately limit how many species can inhabit any given place or area”
― Ken Thompson, Where Do Camels Belong?: Why Invasive Species Aren't All Bad

“But I love the teaching: the hard work of a first class, the fun of the second class. Then the misery of the third.”
― Ken Thompson

“When it’s hard to work on. I do it much quicker than most people do. I’ll throw away code as soon I want to add something to it and I get the feeling that what I have to do to add it is too hard. I’ll throw it away and start over and come up with a different partitioning that makes it easy to do whatever I wanted to do. I’m really quick on the trigger for throwing stuff out.”
― Ken Thompson

“It would be easy to get the idea from all this that Mimosa is some kind of genius, a veritable Einstein among vegetables. But there's no evidence for this at all. The reason all this work has focused on Mimosa is simply that its ability to move (and fast) makes it a convenient experimental subject, which in turn reveals just what a hasty bunch we are; other plants may well be smarter than Mimosa, but until very recently biologists had generally decided that it would take too long to find out.”
― Ken Thompson, Darwins Most Wonderful Plants

“And I knew them by name and reputation. And they were still doing fun things. To me, work was work and these guys weren’t working. They were having a good time. Just like school.”
― Ken Thompson