Lord knows I learned Unix by watching my peers type it...

In the long run that was both good and bad, though, since now all I get to see people type are shell scripts which range from brilliant to rubbish... The only way to know where on that spectrum things are is to read a bunch of them... and to get burned a few times stealing the techniques that are best described, in hindsight, as "it seemed like a good idea at the time."

Warner

On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 8:47 AM, Clem cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

Yeah. We lost that and it was a good thing. Programming became a operation between you and your computer in the privacy of your own office.

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite.

> On May 15, 2018, at 10:37 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 08:17:38AM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
>> "Ron Natalie" <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I never really learned VI. I can stumbled through it in ex mode if I have
>>> to. If there's no EMACS on the UNIX system I'm using, I use ed.
>>> You get real good at regular expressions. Some of my employees were
>>> pretty amazed at how fast I could make code changes with just ed.
>>
>> I did learn vi, after having learned ed first. I drop down to the ex
>> command line for major regexp-based surgery too. I also get the amazement
>> from co-workers who watch me do stuff. :-) This is particularly true
>> of the, er, younger coworkers (kids today ... :-) who can't manage
>> outside an IDE.
>
> In fairness to them, I don't know how you learn the good stuff outside
> of a terminal room. I learned so much by watching the screen change
> and going "WTF? How did you do that?"
>
> There is only so much you can stuff into a manual.
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm