"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.
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.
Slightly off topic: The manuals for COHERENT and the compiler products were, rather split into 'man' pages like Unix, were organized in a Lexicon. This enabled having one alpabetically-organized manual without separate sections. Thus, for the letter 'C', you can see 'c' as a command, followed by 'C language' as an overview, 'C Preprocessor -- overview', and further on 'calling conventions -- Definition'. This enabled adding much supporting material without exploding the page count.
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.
I don't capitalize command names as a matter of habit, no matter where in a block of text they occur, partly because:
root@thaumaturgy:/home/rob# Iptables
bash: Iptables: command not found
But, I agree that it can look a bit awkward. The usual fix is to use a different font and sometimes a different size or weight for text that's a command or programming idiom, and that's worked out pretty well for me too so far.
Ah neural nets though the representation of term rewrite in form of a recursion theory of finite automata with respect to constraint based back-propagation to derive an inductive history rewrite mechanism in retrospect to N v NP depending on the terminal nodes. s/ex/&pression/
First of all this question isn't all that relevant to the article. Second, it's a question of capitalization methods, not grammar, and more of a style decision than a language rule. Do what you feel is right.
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.