unix

• Well, enough clowning around. Perl is, in intent, a cleaned up and summarized version of that wonderful semi-natural language known as 'Unix'.

  — Larry Wall

• Controlling a laser with Linux is crazy, but everyone in this room is crazy in his own way. So if you want to use Linux to control an industrial welding laser, I have no problem with your using <code>PREEMPT_RT</code>.

  — Linus Torvalds

• Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix.

  — Theo de Raadt

• I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the demigodic party.

  — Dennis M. Ritchie

• Microsoft NT...is going to be very far-reaching. It's going to grab the rug out from under Unix.

  — Gordon Bell

• The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.

  — Brian Kernighan

• Everything was small... and my heart sinks for Linux when I see the size of it.

  — Douglas McIlroy

• An unlimited-length file name is a file. The content of a file is its own best name.

  — Jef Raskin

• We have persistent objects, they're called files.

  — Ken Thompson

• Word and Excel and PowerPoint and other Microsoft programs have intimate — one might say promiscuous — knowledge of each others' internals. In Unix, one tries to design programs to operate not specifically with each other, but with programs as yet unthought of.

  — Douglas McIlroy

• In Plan 9, the key abstraction is the file system—anything you can read and write and select by names in a hierarchy—and the protocol exports that abstraction to remote channels to enable distribution.

  — Ken Thompson

• This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

  — Douglas McIlroy

• Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement

  — Hal Abelson

• Unix was small, and you could go through it line by line and understand exactly how it worked. That was the origin of the so-called Unix culture.

  — Ken Thompson

• It's proof that open-source can breed monsters just like the commercial pros.

  — Douglas McIlroy

• You can use any editor you want, but remember that vi vi vi is the text editor of the beast.

  — Richard Stallman

• When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi.

  — Larry Wall

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

  — Donald Knuth

• What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix.

  — Erik Naggum

• It does everything Unix does only less reliably.

  — Ken Thompson