
Unix and Beyond: An Interview with Ken Thompson - luriel
http://genius.cat-v.org/ken-thompson/interviews/unix-and-beyond
======
additive
This is one of my favourites. So many nuggets in there. A very nice interview.
Programmers like Thompson are the only thing that keeps me interested in
computers.

It's really sad that the loudest voices in computing are no longer thinkers
like Ken Thompson. Look at some of comments in this thread. Pathetic. It's
like Slashdotters insulting W. Richard Stevens after his passing. Extreme
stupidity.

How many programmers these days can build from the bottom up? How many can
start with a blank canvas?

It's a little troubling to me that he has to work for Google (as much as I
love GOOG their work is not exactly stuff of Bell Labs: how can we serve more
ads?), but I guess you have to do what you have to do.

The comments about his music collection are great. "Illegal downloading!" :)
The legal department just looked the other way.

He also more or less says, in this field, there are really no new ideas. This
is hard for today's programmers to accept I guess: the idea it's all been done
before. But oh how I wish today's self-proclaimed "productive" programmers -
who are alamringly ignorant of history and even contemptuous toward any code
does not meet their strange notions of "freshness" - how I wish they would
take Thompson's comments to heart.

Now, here's a question: How similar is Go to Sean Dorward's Limbo? If we put
them side-by-side how many similarities would we see? If no one answers, I may
just do this myself. I think it would be interesting.

~~~
zem
> It's a little troubling to me that he has to work for Google (as much as I
> love GOOG their work is not exactly stuff of Bell Labs: how can we serve
> more ads?)

google has some very interesting systems problems to be solved that are almost
entirely divorced from the fact that the monetary goal is serving ads, or even
that the core goal is organising the world's information. the company is
seriously attempting to push the boundaries of "how can we make large clusters
of people, machines and networks more efficient and productive", and
thompson's work on go is squarely in that realm.

(disclaimer: i work for google, but i was a fan of that aspect of the company
long before i joined)

~~~
antidoh
I agree with your gentle disagreement with your parent.

Google serves ads on top of search results for the same reason that ATT sent
bills for phone service: to make money. If you focus on Google's ad serving as
their reason to exist, then you might as well focus on ATT as a billing
company, as those are the direct ways that both make money.

And in that vein, Google and ATT (well, the old ATT) are much more alike than
different. They both took existing fledgling technology and essentially re-
invented it into a profoundly reliable and life changing system; in fact they
all but invented a new science.

There are orders of magnitude difference in depth and impact between twisting
two wires together and the physical and information science discovered and
invented by ATT, and there are equally orders of magnitude difference between
serving up an html page of a computer's directory and the physical and
information science discovered and invented by Google.

Either one is a fine place for Ken Thompson or anyone else to work.

~~~
additive
Good points. But... why did Google kill Google Labs? Why not have a separate
entity for basic research, like Bell Labs? There is no shortage of funding.

I do see a major difference between selling ads to advertisers (and organising
the world's personal information for profit) and selling phone service(s) to
customers, but maybe that's just my perspective - I've been using the
telephone and the web much longer than most people working at Google - I've
seen how things could be done differently.

~~~
jsnell
You seem to have misunderstood what Google Labs was. It was not an
organization doing basic research. It was (crappy) infrastructure for making
neat little experiments available to the public without making them production
quality.

~~~
additive
Yeah, I knew that. I didn't mean to imply it was a separate entity for doing
basic research. What I meant was the fact they closed it seemed to suggest
that the idea of research for its own sake is not really somethng Google is
interested in. At least, that how it looks from outside the Googleplex. Inside
it may look different. (And yes, I am aware that employees are allowed to
publish. But that research is almost always for the ultimate purpose of
furthering ad sales, though it may not be immediately obvious to the outside
observer.)

It's also interesting how Google employees, at least the ones who post on HN,
seem to be isolated from what is going on elsewhere in the company. Is there
cross-pollination between functional groups within Google? Great research
organisations often have this quality. (Prepare for waxing poetic from young
Google employees who think they are changing the world...)

~~~
zem
"labs" was an unfortunate name, google labs was about product experiments
rather than basic research. what you want is
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_X_Lab>, whence emerged (in the "what has
google done for us lately" department) the self-driving car and the augmented-
reality glasses.

------
mseepgood
May 1999. Not exactly news. Chances are high that we already read it 13 years
ago. I'd be more interested in an interview about the things that he worked on
more recently, such as the Go language, or what he's planning to do on this
winter vacation.

~~~
damian2000
Have you seen this one from 2011? [http://www.drdobbs.com/open-
source/interview-with-ken-thomps...](http://www.drdobbs.com/open-
source/interview-with-ken-thompson/229502480)

~~~
mseepgood
Thanks for the link. Here's a video from 2012 starring him:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sln-gJaURzk> Not an interview, but he
sometimes says a sentence.

------
billyjobob
Thompson: I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft—a backlash against
Microsoft, no more and no less. I don't think it will be very successful in
the long run. I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and
pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this
source, and the quality varies drastically.

My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite
unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. In a non-PC
environment, it just won't hold up. If you're using it on a single box, that's
one thing. But if you want to use Linux in firewalls, gateways, embedded
systems, and so on, it has a long way to go.

~~~
batista
> _My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite
> unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. In a non-PC
> environment, it just won't hold up. If you're using it on a single box,
> that's one thing. But if you want to use Linux in firewalls, gateways,
> embedded systems, and so on, it has a long way to go._

Huh? Linux _IS_ used in servers, embedded devices, gateways, firewalls,
cellphones, what have you...

What exactly is "unreliable" about it, except a very vague accusation?

~~~
eckyptang
I was still using Sun/Solaris machines back in '99 when this was written,
which were considerably more reliable from an every day use perspective. Most
of the negative comments and opinion came from people who'd worked with
industrial grade kit and moved to cheap PCs with Linux on.

To be honest, if you go back that far, Windows NT 4 on Compaq Professional
Workstations was probably the most reliable thing out there believe it or not
so I'm not sure where the hell these comments came from.

