Wrongful convictions ultimately destroy the lives of the people who are wrongfully convicted, as well as their families, and also do great damage to the integrity of the justice system, the people of Brooklyn elected me to ensure that justice is done and that is what my decision to vacate Derrick Hamilton’s conviction reflects.

Ken Thompson

Categorized in : US News

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

Ken Thompson

great-day computer lines

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

Ken Thompson

code programming trust

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

Ken Thompson

programming want way

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

Ken Thompson

brilliant views ideas

We have persistent objects, they're called files.

Ken Thompson

files persistent objects

When in doubt, use brute force.

Ken Thompson

programming use doubt

SCCS, the source motel! Programs check in and never check out!

Ken Thompson

checks program humorous

I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.

Ken Thompson

simple writing thinking

I don't think there are many people up in research who have strong ideas about things that they haven't really had experience with.

Ken Thompson

strong ideas thinking

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

Ken Thompson

scrutiny source levels

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

Ken Thompson

different two facts

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

Ken Thompson

programming program server

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 reading jobs

A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.

Ken Thompson

wells bugs impossible

FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.

Ken Thompson

three choices race

The steady state of disks is full.

Ken Thompson

steady states humorous

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

Ken Thompson

hackers criminals serious

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

Ken Thompson

college games exercise

I am a very bottom-up thinker.

Ken Thompson

bottom thinker

There's a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data.

Ken Thompson

executing data power