
The Short History of GCC Development (2005) - vmorgulis
http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Stallman/history_of_gcc_development.shtml
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avz
> He stared writing the compiler being almost thirty years old. That means at
> the time when his programming abilities started to decline.

Citation needed. Even accepting the results of various studies that show age-
correlated decline in some measures of programming ability, one cannot take
those results and conclude that a specific programmer's ability began to
decline at 30. Also, AFAIR the studies don't agree on a specific age and
report increasing variance which makes it even less reasonable to make the
conclusion the author made.

~~~
to3m
Maybe he is talking about Stallman specifically.

~~~
DonHopkins
Whatever his change in programming ability, I would guess that his change in
typing ability from carpal tunnel problems overshadowed it.

There's also the change in programming ability due to switching from Lisp to
C. (And then having to dictate C code to a typist).

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cyphar
The article is full of misrepresentations. First off, GCC was written from
scratch (because the pastel compiler had some design issues), which is
evidenced _in the quote the author provides_. However, the whole thing reads
as a "we'd be better off without Stallman" piece, using words like "tired",
*exhausted" and claiming that because Richard didn't write any papers on
compilers that he must've not done many new things while writing GCC.

I'm not sure why the author seems to have a grudge against Stallman, but I'd
invite them to reconsider.

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anta40
>> Hoping to avoid the need to write the whole compiler myself, I obtained the
source code for the Pastel compiler, which was a multi-platform compiler
developed at Lawrence Livermore Lab. It supported, and was written in, an
extended version of Pascal...

I'm curious if the Pastel source code is available somewhere on the net...

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GFK_of_xmaspast
"Compilers take a long time to mature. The first more or less stable release
seems to be 1.17 (January 9, 1988) That was pure luck as in 1989 the
Emacs/Xemacs split started that consumed all his energy. "

That's a generous spin on it.

