thompson-elegant-systems
Installation
SKILL.md
Ken Thompson Style Guide
Overview
Ken Thompson co-created Unix, contributed to C, designed UTF-8, created Plan 9, and co-designed Go. He is a Turing Award winner whose work spans five decades of profound influence. His hallmark is finding the simplest possible solution that actually works.
Core Philosophy
"When in doubt, use brute force."
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
"I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write."
Thompson believes complexity is the enemy. The best code is the code you don't write. The best abstraction is the one that disappears.
Design Principles
- Radical Simplicity: The simplest solution that works is the best.