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.
Meaning of the quote
As part of his job, American scientist Ken Thompson had to stay up-to-date with the latest scientific research. But he noticed that he was often reading things that weren't directly related to his academic work, and were instead more useful for his gardening hobby. Even though these scientific articles weren't directly relevant to his job, he found them interesting and helpful for his personal interests.
More quotes from Ken Thompson
When in doubt, use brute force.
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I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.
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We have persistant objects, they’re called files.
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One is that the perfect garden can be created overnight, which it can’t.
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Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you’d put a column thing in there.
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On the one hand, the press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.
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You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself.
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It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution.
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A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.
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I wanted to have virtual memory, at least as it’s coupled with file systems.
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So maybe I can go back to being a Gardeners’ World addict again.
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The X server has to be the biggest program I’ve ever seen that doesn’t do anything for you.
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I wanted to separate data from programs, because data and instructions are very different.
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If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.
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I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won’t have another book finished by next week.
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I also have an idea for a book on biodiversity, and why and how we should be conserving it.
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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.
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The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden.
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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.
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I wanted to avoid, special IO for terminals.
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In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.
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It’s always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.
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No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.
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There’s a lot of power in executing data – generating data and executing data.
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One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.
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I am a programmer.
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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.
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There are no projects per se in the Computing Sciences Research Center.
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In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.
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That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.
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I am a very bottom-up thinker.
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