Comment by philipallstar
13 hours ago
> When was the last time that the author of "grep" was recognized as a great programmer? Never.
Ken Thompson wrote grep, and he is definitely recognised as such.
13 hours ago
> When was the last time that the author of "grep" was recognized as a great programmer? Never.
Ken Thompson wrote grep, and he is definitely recognised as such.
man -T grep | grep 'Free Soft\|Thom'
Sure, he wrote _a_ version of grep, and probably the first, but who cares? "The" (sure, you might run some bsd grep) current version of grep certainly doesn't.
No, he wrote grep. Before he wrote it there was no grep. And yes, he's recognized as a great programmer. With Multics, Unix, B, C, UTF-8 Plan9, Inferno and grep to his name (and probably others that I forgot) he has more than deserved that.
Future grep versions, including the FSF one, were all re-implementations.
Your statement in the GP is nonsensical.
I do not agree he was a great programmer. All of his programs are trivial from a computer science perspective.
In fact, you can quite easily check this by trying to let an LLM generate a program like grep. It can do that. Now, there also exist programs for which LLMs can't generate code, because it's too complex.
3 replies →
I'm just saying this is incorrect:
> When was the last time that the author of "grep" was recognized as a great programmer? Never.
He is recognised as that. Your opinion on him is nothing to do with anything.