

The history of grep - danso
https://medium.com/rualthanzauva/grep-was-a-private-command-of-mine-for-quite-a-while-before-i-made-it-public-ken-thompson-a40e24a5ef48

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saretired
"One guy McIlroy" was Doug McIlroy, head of computing research at Bell Labs at
the time, the inventor of pipes, diff, etc., and an eminent guy.

Before Thompson published his construction for matching regular expressions in
the late '60s, Kleene's re work was pretty much purely theoretical. That's
really the interesting story, solving an extremely difficult implementation
problem on the machines of the era.

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akuma73
GNU grep was written my Mike Haertel, not Haerkal as written in the article.

Super smart guy.

~~~
snowwrestler
His email about why GNU grep is fast contains one of my favorite quotes about
programming. Don't know if he coined it.

> The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing. ;-)

~~~
dredmorbius
A favorite here as well.

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simplicio
Article raises a 21st century grammar question. If a sentence starts with the
name of a computer command, and the invocation of the command is all
lowercase, do you still capitalize the command name? Apparently the author
thinks you don't, the man pages thinks you do, and Ken Thompson doesn't
believe in capitalization at all.

~~~
kej
The consensus seems to be that things like iPhone and eBay get to keep their
lower case letter even at the start of a sentence. I'd say grep deserves the
same treatment.

~~~
dllthomas
Besides, G/re/p doesn't seem to make sense as an ed command...

