Bear's Log

A very sad week so far, Tim Bray says it better than I would so I’m just going to quote him:

Some things we now know to be good ideas:

• Writ­ing op­er­at­ing sys­tems in a com­piled ma­chine-in­de­pen­dent lan­guage
• Per­form­ing file I/O by read­ing, writ­ing, or over­writ­ing in­te­gral num­bers of bytes at in­te­gral off­sets.
• Cre­at­ing processes by du­pli­cat­ing ex­ist­ing processes.
• Null-ter­mi­nated byte strings.
• In­vest­ing a sub­stan­tial pro­por­tion of pro­gram­mers’ time in build­ing tool­ing to make them­selves more pro­duc­tive.
• When ex­plain­ing a new pro­gram­ming tech­nique, start­ing with “Hello, world”.

It’s hard to be­lieve that there was a time when any of these weren’t con­ven­tional wis­dom, but there was such a time. Unix is com­posed of more ob­vi­ous-in-ret­ro­spect en­gi­neer­ing de­sign choices than any­thing else I’ve seen or am likely to see in my life­time.

It is im­pos­si­ble — ab­solutely im­pos­si­ble — to over­state the debt my pro­fes­sion owes to Den­nis Ritchie. I’ve been liv­ing in a world he helped in­vent for over thirty years.