4 Jul
2024
4 Jul
'24
8:59 a.m.
On Wednesday, July 3rd, 2024 at 6:53 PM, John Levine <johnl(a)taugh.com> wrote:
According to sjenkin(a)canb.auug.org.au:
To add to the praise, Ken, yourself, and others weren't exactly working on modern
115200 baud terminal emulators and IDEs with all the fancy modern tab completion and
automatic linting either. History has given me an appreciation that these sorts of
conveniences work at all. If I'm ever having a really bad day with my tools, I just
think about Ken, Dennis, et. al. hammering away at 33 ASRs making legends happen and
suddenly I don't feel so bad.
- Matt G.
Developers of Initial Unix arguably were 10x-100x
more productive than IBM OS/360, a ‘best practice’ development at the time,
so what CSRC did differently is worth close examination.
Ken Thompson was an astonishingly productive programmer. I don't think
you can build a business plan that starts with "hire someone like
Ken."
One weekend just for fun he pounded out most of an APL interpreter,
which I then took and spent a month part time adding a few features
like saving and loading workspaces, and adjusting it to use the APL
character set on our funky bitmap terminals at Yale. He did more in
the weekend than I did in the month, and I am not a terrible
programmer.