Kenneth Lane Thompson Quotes

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

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

• When in doubt, use brute force.

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

• 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.

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

• We have persistant objects, they’re called files.

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

• 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.

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

• There’s a lot of power in executing data – generating data and executing data.

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

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

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

• The X server has to be the biggest program I’ve ever seen that doesn’t do anything for you.

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

• The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden.

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

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

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

• So maybe I can go back to being a Gardeners’ World addict again.

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

• One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

• One is that the perfect garden can be created overnight, which it can’t.

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

• On the one hand, the press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

• No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

• It’s always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

• It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution.

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

• In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

• In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

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

  Kenneth Lane Thompson

Kenneth Lane Thompson (31)

Birth:	4th February, 1943
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Computer Scientist

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• 1932 - Umberto Eco
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• 1994 - Thomas P. O'Neill
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• 2010 - Kenneth Noland