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Comment by jacquesm

11 hours ago

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.