Science Quote by Ken Thompson

Thompson’s line lands like an offhand jab, but it’s really a miniature manifesto about tool design. The “column thing” is a dig at Fortran’s notorious fixed-format source code, where meaning depended on which character column you typed in: labels here, continuation marks there, comments somewhere else. In other words, the language didn’t just have syntax; it had typography. Thompson is teasing Grant (likely a collaborator with editor opinions) by suggesting that if you even tried to “edit Fortran,” you’d be tempted to bake those rigid physical constraints into the editor itself.

The intent is half-comedy, half warning: editors shouldn’t become prosthetics for a language’s worst habits. If your tooling has to enforce columnar superstition, the problem isn’t the editor; it’s the ecosystem that normalized such fragility. Thompson’s wit works because it flips the usual hierarchy. We tend to think of editors as neutral instruments and languages as the expressive layer. Here, the language’s legacy baggage threatens to dominate the instrument, turning an editor into a compliance machine.

The subtext points straight at the Unix ethos Thompson helped shape: tools should be small, composable, and forgiving; data and text should stay portable; rules should live in the right place. “Put a column thing in there” is what happens when you let historical accidents harden into permanent interface. It’s also a reminder that “backward compatibility” often means memorializing arbitrary constraints, then calling that discipline. Thompson’s joke makes that feel, correctly, a little absurd.