Not being Ken Thompson is a struggle every working software engineer has to contend with.

In Swedish the word "grep" means "pitchfork" which I've always though fit beautifully. You have a stream of stuff coming in and you jam your pitchfork in to grab what you're interested in.

grep is not only a program, it has become a verb. It is common among computer people to talk about grepping for something. Which may or may not actually be done with grep.

When he said "25 years ago" my first thought was "1975". Then he said "1993", and I realised that we're already close to 20 years into the 21st century. Wow.

You don't see this quality content on TV.

I've been watching videos from this channel for a pretty long time and I just now realized that this guy is THE Brian Kernighan.

It's great to watch and hear legendary computer scientists talk about such fundamental and ubiquitous tools.

I'm not Ken Thompson 😔😔

The awe with which you, Mr. Brian Kernighan, speak of Mr. Ken Thompson... It just drives home the fact that we all just stand on the shoulders of giants. You might have received astronomical amounts of these, but here is one more: THANK YOU.

"None of them were Ken Thompson". Their big disadvantage was that Ken Thompson, as ED's author, knew the program inside out, everything it could do, how it worked, and all the things he'd tried and already knew wouldn't work. The students first had to understand how the program worked.

Students: this project is impossible

At an interview -

“And of course they all had one disadvantage, None of them were Ken Thompson”

This video is such a gem! Computerphile is making a great contribution to the history of computer science.

I learned Fortran in the mid 60s. It required punch cards and a single error would reject your whole batch.

"I was teaching at Princeton as a visitor, and I needed an assignment for my programming class. And I thought "Hmm!". So what I did was to tell them - the students in the class: "OK, here is the source code for 'ed'. It was at the time probably 1800 lines of C. "Your job is to take these 1800 lines of C and convert them into 'grep' as a C program. OK, and you've got a week to do it". And I told them at that point, that they had a couple of advantages. First, they what the target was. Somebody had already done 'grep' so they knew what it was supposed to look like. And all they had to do was replicate that behaviour. And the other thing is that it was now written in C. The original 'grep' was written in PDP 11 assembly language. And of course, they also had one grave disadvantage: None of them were Ken Thompson."

Thank you Mr. Kernighan and all your contemplates like Bill Joy, Dennis Richie, Ken Thompson, and others for giving us the greatest computing environment imaginable. Amazing how after 50 years it's still so relevant because of your genius.

This guy is one of the living legends of computer science! I still have his book at home <3

A lot of the aspects of ed that are covered here still work in vi (or even vim).

<quote>...and the original grep was written in PDP-11 assembly language...</quote>!> Overnight.....