27 Mar
2017
27 Mar
'17
3:36 a.m.
Nudging the thread back twoard Unix history:
I really
like how blindingly obvious a lot of the original Unix code was. Not saying
it was all that way, but a ton of it was sort of what you would imagine it
to be before you saw it. Which means I understood it and could bugfix it.
That's an important aspect of Thompson's genius--code so clean and right
that, having seen it, one cannot imagine it otherwise. But the odds are
that the same program from another hand would not have the same ring of
inevitability. As Erdos was wont to say of an elegant proof, "It comes