[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Steve Johnson]

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,  I suppose those of
us who worked on Unix should be very flattered.  I just wish they had
imitated the programming style and sense of taste.  The gcc
 _manual_ is 500 pages -- bigger than the entire Unix distribution. 
The options alone are almost 100 pages.  The average line in the
source code is an ifdef of some machine you've never heard of.  If
you are doing anything the slightest bit unusual (e.g., increasing the
default stack size) you need a different option for each machine
target.  Hmm, I thought the point of C was to be portable...

I recently started using clang, and I'm never going back to gcc.  I
feel so much cleaner now...

Steve

----- Original Message -----
From:
 chet
.ramey
@case.edu

To:
"Ron Natalie" <ron
@ronnatalie
.com>, "Larry McVoy
" <lm
@mcvoy
.com>, "Theodore Ts'o
" <tytso
@mit
.edu
>
Cc:
<tuhs
@minnie
.tuhs
.org>
Sent:
Sun, 17 Sep
 2017 14:37:59 -0400
Subject:
Re: [TUHS
] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie
!

 On 9/16/17 8:59 AM, Ron Natalie wrote:
 > RMS
 hates UNIX. That was clear in the original manifesto. But he's also
 > a megalomaniac and believes that if you even use a GNU tool your
work
 > becomes his.

 Nah, this is BS. Stallman
 might not like Unix, and he clearly has a very
 large ego -- as do many of us here -- but that "belief" is just crap.
The
 thing that comes closest to it is bison, and the output of bison is
 explicitly excluded. There is the issue of GPL
 libraries (like readline
),
 and that's a pain for people who want to link with them, but that
doesn't
 count as "even use a GNU tool."

 -- 
 ``The lyf
 so short, the craft so long to lerne
.''
 - Chaucer
 ``Ars
 longa
, vita brevis''
 - Hippocrates
Chet
 Ramey
, UTech
, CWRU
 chet
@case.edu
 http
://cnswww
.cns
.cwru
.edu
/~chet
/

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