I thought the most precious bit was when he imagined the author of grep as basking in the glow of a dozen xterms. Maybe the author of gnu grep, but not the author of the True Grep. At least he said vi rather than vim. But, you see, in the age of 18 year old hackers running Ubuntu and Compiz, such minor distinctions are just not worth making.
Edit: I'll give the author this much, it was a cute exposition style.
"I've seen [visual] editors like that, but I don't feel a need for them. I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing." - Ken Thompson (author of grep)
(That was a while ago. Apparently he now uses sam)
I have a Unix book from 1984, in which vi is described as "this new editor which has more features than a normal user would ever want to know about, and as a consequence is a huge memory hog".
It's present in the 3BSD distribution I have from 1979, from tuhs.org. I don't think any copies of 2BSD survive. I think '76 is about the time Sixth Edition came out, so I don't think it's likely that vi started that early.
I just googled it, and 1976 seems to be the common release date, but without any references. On this page[1], it says that BSD (1977) had ex, and 2BSD includes vi, so that would make the first public release 1978.
Considering the age of Unix, calling vi new in 1984 would still make little sense, but maybe the book mentioned was actually written long before that date.
I think it might have been Richie who said about vi that it was designed for an age and technology that simply don't exist anymore.
It's a sentiment that can be applied to ed as well. ed is designed for a time when bandwidth was minuscule and every one wrote their programs out on paper for the first dozen iterations. Of course you didn't need to see the state of the file, you had it on paper in front of you. All you needed was the state of whatever line number the compiler was choking on.
Today everyone (for most values of everyone) composes in the editor so we need an editor that is good at composing as well as editing.
I checked to see if the author of GNU grep left a comment, and was not disappointed:
"I’m here with Mike Haertel, GNU grep author and the author of the performance hack that bedeviled you so. He Googled your article somehow a while ago and was highly amused. [...]"
Actually these days I'm not even sure which is more offensive, Mac OS X which has always been smugly bastardized Unix, or Ubuntu which has most recently been making everyone think their crappy Linux modifications are the only proper ones (and making "Ubuntu" synonymous with "Linux")
Haha, cheap shot, but isn't a good thing that Unix has such a diverse community now? Many years ago, after OSX had been out for a while, even the Mac greybeards started poking at the terminal, isn't that cool? Or does the pool of new users somehow drain from the entire pool?
Yeah, damn those jerks who make a Linux distro that people actually want to use. Betcha those asshats also care about making awesome software more accessible to new users! What dicks.
Edit: I'll give the author this much, it was a cute exposition style.