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Ken Thompson quotes

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Re: Ken Thompson quotes

#51

Post by pk2200 »

nappy-doo wrote: post #43

Years ago, I started at Google, and was in Charlie's cafe, eating alone. I'm sitting there, and up walks Ken Thompson. He sits down, introduces himself as Ken, and asks me what I work on. We sat there for a good 40 minutes just chatting. One of my coolest memories of working at Google was that time. He was so down to earth, never bothered to talk up about who he was (even though I knew). I really appreciated that.

I have a similar Google lunch story. A guy sat down, introduced himself as Rob, and told me it was his first day at Google. We had a nice chat, and later I told my office mate that the new guy seemed really smart. He laughed and told me I'd just had lunch with Rob Pike. :)

Re: Ken Thompson quotes

#52

Post by CalChris »

When in doubt, use brute force.

The first time I read that it was in something about Belle playing Q v R against Walter Browne. Belle had the R and Browne had to mate in 50 moves. Seven piece tablebases are achievable now.

Re: Ken Thompson quotes

#53

Post by Waterluvian »

AimHere wrote: post #39
Waterluvian wrote: post #14

On his quote about educational value of UNIX and being so small you can go through it line by line to lean what it does. Can someone recommend a version appropriate for doing this?

As well as Minix, which is intended as just such a teaching aid and comes with a textbook, there's the Lions book, which is a complete annotated source listing of an early Unix, and which was passed around as nerd Samizdat for a while, until the Unix copyright status was changed. http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/index.php

Thank you, and thank you everyone else for all these resources. My wife will be rather displeased that I'm not playing Divinity 2 with her this holiday weekend ;)

Re: Ken Thompson quotes

#54

Post by scriptproof »

OskarS wrote: post #12
scriptproof wrote: post #9

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

He didn't say "proprietary code is evil" or "property is theft", dude's not Richard Stallman. Also, Google does plenty of open source stuff, including Go, which Thompson works on.

I am more thinking to Steve Ballmer. But I should have been more explicit.

Re: Ken Thompson quotes

#55

Post by bgun »

CalChris wrote: post #52

When in doubt, use brute force. The first time I read that it was in something about Belle playing Q v R against Walter Browne. Belle had the R and Browne had to mate in 50 moves. Seven piece tablebases are achievable now.

Also seems equivalent to pg's "Do things that don't scale" maxim.

Re: Ken Thompson quotes

#56

Post by vram22 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #14

On his quote about educational value of UNIX and being so small you can go through it line by line to lean what it does. Can someone recommend a version appropriate for doing this?

As other replies say, I too have read that the Lions' stuff is highly recommended; have not read it though. I have read good chunks of The Design of the Unix Operating System by Maurice Bach, some years ago, which included both concepts and either code or pseudocode for various kernel algorithms such as scheduling, etc, IIRC. Might not be up to date for today's Unixen, but should be good for learning a lot about the basics of Unix internals, I'd say. Disclaimer: I read it out of interest, not done kernel level work myself.

Edited for typo.

Re: Ken Thompson quotes

#57

Post by kps »

DonHopkins wrote: post #48
Gracana wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oops, sorry to mislead you. I was wrong about Unix ed. I knew it had powerful regex and line addressing, I figured it had character addressing/cursor positioning too. CP/M ed has basic search and replace, but most work is done with cursor movements.

ITS Emacs has "glass tty" support that responded to keystrokes exactly as normal, but only showed one current line by repainting it without using any fancy control characters or escape codes, just backspace, carriage return and line feed. (That's what it meant to be "glass".) So ^L would refresh just the current line, and you could ^N down through a file to print it out line by line. http://www.finseth.com/craft/#c2

Vi likewise has ':open'.

Re: Ken Thompson quotes

#58

Post by hollander »

OskarS wrote: post #11
dm319 wrote: post #10

Some gems: > "I've seen [visual] editors like that, but I don't feel a need for them. I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing." -Thompson on the superiority of ed to editors such as today's vi or emacs, as summarized by Peter Salus in A Quarter Century of UNIX (Addison-Wesley, 1994). > The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you. and I'm glad linux has…

That first one you quoted is pretty incredible. It's hard for me to even imagine writing many thousands of lines of code in ed today.

I think that the programs, back in the days, were not many thousands lines of code. They were small, and did only one or two things. Each program doing one thing reliably with a simple interface, and you can call it from another program, and build something big from that. But still, they are all small pieces of code.

Re: Ken Thompson quotes

#59

Post by uep »

DonHopkins wrote: post #26
neilsimp1 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. - Linus Torvalds

Actually, that quote was "formulated" by Eric S Raymond (to whom Theo was referring as "the originator of the statement"), and is only deceptively named "Linux's Law" [1] in "honor" of Linus Torvalds, which is ironic because it actually dishonors him by being invalid. The point that Theo was making is that ESR talks and talks and types and types about many eyeballs looking at code, but when it comes down to actually…

Tell us how you really feel about ESR [1].

I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis [2], but this argument seems strange:

>Neither "enough eyeballs" nor "the right eyeballs" are a GIVEN, even for open source software.

and this argument:

> "Not enough eyeballs" (or "ZERO eyeballs" as he loves to claim) are NOT a GIVEN for proprietary software,

Are you an auditor of proprietary software or something? It almost sounds like you're arguing for many-eyes in theory, but you're saying that it's just as likely to benefit proprietary software? That is pretty bonkers to me. Even the 2-4 reviewers thing seems ridiculous, because open source software might be studied years later. In fact, companies trying to sell software analysis tools often fix bugs in open source software to demo their tools; something that they cannot do with proprietary software.

> Although detection of even deliberately inserted flaws can be attributed to Raymond's claim, the persistence of the Heartbleed security bug in a critical piece of code for two years has been considered as a refutation of Raymond's dictum.

I find it amusing that there seem to be this contingent of proprietary code proponents who insist that Heartbleed was the singular proof against "many-eyes". Since this particular security issue is the one thing that critics always point to, it almost seems like this is the exception that proves the rule[3]. Discussion also tends to leave out that it was discovered and patched by people other than the core developers because it was open source.

Closed source software security bugs don't seem to get pithy names because they're so common. If we're cherry-picking cases, how about Windows XP? Beloved software created by arguably the biggest, most advanced proprietary software developers at the time. There was a period of time when you could not turn a machine on for an hour without it being compromised. Or serious bugs that are trivially exploitable and are known about and not fixed for many years [4].

1. I think reasonable people would disagree with ESR about various opinions he has expressed. You really sound like you have a bone to pick though.

2. There is just as much diversity in open source software as there is in proprietary. I do suspect that truly bad code doesn't get used as much in the open source world as it does in the proprietary world though.

3. All software has bugs, DJB creations excepted. It seems like critics are saying "Ha! See! Open source has security bugs too!" No shit. Of course, in a black and white world, this could be considered refutation of ESR.

4. Not really an exploit, but this denial of service is one of my favorites because of how trivial it is and how badly it crushes old versions of Windows:

http://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2010-4669/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00yjWB6gGy8

Edit: formatting.

Re: Ken Thompson quotes

#60

Post by acqq »

It seems this is a real story from the time Ken Thompson started to work at Google:

"Q: I know Google has a policy where every new employee has to get checked out on languages before they're allowed to check code in. Which means you had to get checked out on C [which you co-created].

Thompson: Yeah, I haven't been.

Q. You haven't been! You're not allowed to check in code?

Thompson: I'm not allowed to check in code, no... I just haven't done it. I've so far found no need to."

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/21/ken_thompson_take_o...

"So Mr Thompson, you say you have some programming skills..."

Does anybody have any update on that?

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