Ken Thompson

When in doubt, use brute force.

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

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

C++ certainly has its good points. But by and large I think it’s a bad language. It does a lot of things half well and it’s just a garbage heap of ideas that are mutually exclusive. It’s way too big, way too complex. And it’s obviously built by a committee.

I’ve never been a lover of existing code. Code by itself almost rots and it’s gotta be rewritten. Even when nothing has changed, for some reason it rots.

Modern programming scares me in many respects. It confuses me to read a program which you must read top-down. It says “do something.” And you go find “something.” And you read it and it says, “do something else” and you go find something and it says, “do something else” and it goes back to the top maybe. And nothing gets done. It’s just relegating the problem to a deeper and deeper level.

I’ll throw away code as soon I want to add something to it and I get the feeling that what I have to do to add it is too hard.

Documenting is very, very hard; it’s time-consuming. To do it right, you’ve got to do it like programming. You’ve got to deconstruct it, put it together in nice ways, rewrite it when it’s wrong. People don’t do that.