Ken Thompson quotes

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On the one hand, the press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.
Ken Thompson
Movies
Heroes
Kids
Press
Television
No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.
Ken Thompson
Will
It's always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.
Ken Thompson
Ideas
That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.
Ken Thompson
Beauty
Collaboration
In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.
Ken Thompson
Life
Fact
Unauthorized access to computer systems is already a serious crime in a few states and is currently being addressed in many more state legislatures as well as Congress.
Ken Thompson
Being
Computer
Congress
Crime
State
states
In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.
Ken Thompson
College
Games
Programming
If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.
Ken Thompson
Want
The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden.
Ken Thompson
Garden
There's a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data.
Ken Thompson
Power
We tried to avoid, you know, records. We were told over and over that was probably the most serious mistake and the reason was the system would never catch on, because we didn't have records.
Ken Thompson
Mistake
Reason
When in doubt, use brute force.
Ken Thompson
Doubt
Force
You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself.
Ken Thompson
Trust
One is that the perfect garden can be created overnight, which it can't.
Ken Thompson
Garden
There are no projects per se in the Computing Sciences Research Center.
Ken Thompson
Projects
Research