[TUHS] Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sat, 3 Feb 2018, Andy Kosela wrote:

> I always admired Ken's passion for minimalism and elegant, simple 
> solutions to IT problems.  Ed(1) will always be the most beautiful 
> editor ever written.

And the one editor that every sysadmin should know.  I still use "expr" in 
my shell scripts, for example, because I don't know how portable the 
Penguin "${...}" construct is.

[...]

> Linux and FreeBSD are now two monstrous trolls, bloated and extremely 
> complex and large.

Looking through /usr/include/***.h, I see:

FreeBSD 10.4:	#define SYS_MAXSYSCALL  548
MacOS Sierra:	#define SYS_MAXSYSCALL  522
Debian 8.10:	I don't know where the Penguins have hidden it...

> I am glad Rob and Ken gave us Go.  It breathed a new life into the 
> complex world of writing software.

That's the second endorsement I've seen for Go; I guess I should learn it.

And yes, I've read the amusing story on Wikipedia :-)  I'm becoming 
annoyed at Perl's bloatedness (I'd hate to see Perl 6), don't like 
Python's silly indentation (although some swear by it), and looking at 
Ruby for stuff where I used to use Perl.

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."