27 Mar
2017
27 Mar
'17
3:44 a.m.
like how blindingly obvious a lot of the original Unix
code was
... sort of what you would imagine it to be before you saw it.
That's a facet of Thompson's genius--code so clean and right that,
having seen it, one cannot imagine it otherwise. Odds are, though,
that the same program from another hand would not have the same
aura of inevitability. As Erdos would say of a particularly elegant
proof, "It comes from the Book," i.e. had divine inspiration.
Doug