Doug McIlroy

"I don't know the counts of Unix and Linux servers. I do know that my heart sinks whenever I look under the hood in Linux. It is has been so overfed by loving hands. Over 240 system calls! Gigabytes of…"

"Doug McIlroy's homepage"

"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."

"Ritchie and Thompson made an amazing team; and they played Unix and C like a fine instrument. They sometimes divided up work almost on a subroutine-by-subroutine basis with such rapport that it almost…"

"Everything was small... and my heart sinks for Linux when I see the size of it. The manual page, which really used to be a manual page, is now a small volume, with a thousand options... We used to sit…"

"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 specifi…"

"The notion of "intricate and beautiful complexities" is almost an oxymoron. Unix programmers vie with each other for "simple and beautiful" honors — a point that's implicit in these rules, but is well…"