Brian Kernighan Quotes

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consistent and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge.

Macintosh felt like a system. As I learned more, I felt like I was able to guess how new things would work. I felt like the bugs in my programs were more my bugs and not things I misunderstood.

There are lots of Linux users who don't care how the kernel works, but only want to use it. That is a tribute to how good Linux is.

I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated.

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

I was surprised about vi going in, though, I didn't know it was in System V.

The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected.

I appreciate all the devices the Windows people are coming up with, but the operating system... I just want to smash it.

Macs are not intuitive. It's intuitive to the person who created it. It's not intuitive to me.

The definition of an 'operating system' is bound to evolve with customer demands and technological possibilities.

And when the time comes to replace the O2 I have today, maybe my next machine will run Linux.

Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX. The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel - that pretty much the entire Internet runs on - is written in C.

I don't have any authority over Linux other than this notion that I know what I'm doing.

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

I very seldom worry about other systems. I concentrate pretty fully on just making Linux the best I can.

This is the system that we have. I didn’t make the system. This is the system that we have.

DOS is ugly and interferes with users' experience.

Unix gives you just enough rope to hang yourself - and then a couple of more feet, just to be sure.

Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time.

I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.

Computers in general, and software in particular, are much more difficult than other kinds of technology for most people to grok, and they overwhelm us with a sense of mystery.

Every time I can find another engineer to add to the Chrome OS platform, I'm going to hire him.

For most people, Twitter is too hard to use.

I find most video games too complicated to play.